[Buildroot] [PATCH RFC] legal-info: add option to store manifest in rootfs

[Luca Ceresoli]

Hi,

On 27/04/2018 22:02, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
> Luca, All,
> 
> On 2018-04-27 18:33 +0200, Luca Ceresoli spake thusly:
>> On 27/04/2018 15:46, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
>>> On Thu, 26 Apr 2018 21:32:52 +0200, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
>>>> Some users want to be able to easily ship the manifest of the legal-info
>>>> directly in the target filesystem.
>>>>
>>>> Those users currently hack their ways around, usign a post-build script
>>>> that calls back to generate legal-info; this is a bit hackish...
>>>>
>>>> Add an option to that effect.
>>>>
>>>> Reported-by: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli at gmail.com>
>>>> Signed-off-by: "Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998 at free.fr>
>>>> Cc: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli at gmail.com>
>>>> Cc: Luca Ceresoli <luca at lucaceresoli.net>
>>>> Cc: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni at bootlin.com>
>>>
>>> I'd like to challenge the usefulness of having the manifest on the
>>> target. What is the actual use case ?
>>>
>>> Indeed, for license compliance of copyleft license (i.e at least GPL,
>>> LGPL), having the name of the software package, its version and its
>>> license is not sufficient, you also need to provide the full
>>> corresponding source code.
>>
>> I think this is partially wrong. I also think the patch is partially
>> wrong.
> 
> I sent the patch as RFC. ;-)
> 
>> And I even think the entire world is partially wrong, but that's
>> another story. :)
> 
> Someone needs to take their pills... ;-)

%-)

>> GPL asks (in certain cases) to display the copyright notice and the
>> license (or a link to it) (more or less) (and remember IANAL:). Android
>> phones are a good esample of it: in the last item of the last menu entry
>> of some obscure app there is an insanely long cat of license texts. One
>> might want to do a similar thing on a device with a suitable GUI. I
>> think this is a reasonable way to be compliant, although there are other
>> ways.
> 
> Yes, but on some devices, it may be very inconvenient to read the whole
> stuff, and thus just the manifest plus an URL for the rest is probably
> OK (not the letter of the licenses, but the spirit) And if that is the
> only deviation from proper compliance and all the rest i OK, there is in
> practive no issue.
> 
>> Hence this patch makes sense to me, but it is insufficient. It should
>> also store the license text in the rootfs, in order for a GUI
>> application to be able to load that text and visualize it.
> 
> For example, my TV set has a similarly long list of legalese, and I
> once tried to browse it to the end. I bailed out after 5 minutes of
> scrolling... It was basically taking ~1s to scroll every single line...
> Having just the list (aka the manifest) plus the URL would be more
> usable! ;-)
> 
> So I think that what Florian needs is acceptable.

Well, sure, it makes some sense _practically_, but not _legally_ AFAICU,
because to be compliant you still would need a written license statement
(e.g. in the printed user manual).

Do we want to support every way that makes sense? We have two at least:
store the manifest and store manifest + license text. If we want to
support both, maybe that would actually carry more complexity than
usefulness, I'm afraid.

But of course I might be partially wrong! :-]
-- 
Luca