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

Florian Fainelli f.fainelli at gmail.com
Fri Apr 27 21:39:20 UTC 2018


On 04/27/2018 02:23 PM, Luca Ceresoli wrote:
> 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! :-]

Let's drop this, I was not thinking this would go into such a lengthy
discussion, I will keep the local hack I have with make legal-info in
post-build.sh. Thanks a lot for your help Yann!
-- 
Florian



More information about the buildroot mailing list