openSUSE packagers' take on the 3 month release cycle

[Harald Sitter]

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Vishesh Handa <me at vhanda.in> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Scott Kitterman <kde at kitterman.com> wrote:
>> There I'd a licensecheck script that does this. It helps, but the results have to be checked and properly documented and so thete is still substantial manual work required. KDE packages are generally better about consistently documenting copyright and licensing, but we still find bugs and it's still a lot of work.
>
> Can we as KDE developers do something to reduce this work load? We
> could create git hooks which reject patches with incompatible
> licesnses? Or something like that?
>
> Once the script has extracted the infromation, do you really need to
> check it? Proper documentation can be automatically generated. (Unless
> I'm missing something)
>
> My overall point is that this problem seems more of a technical one
> than one related to release schedules.

yes, not releated to schedules directly. the problem however is more
social than anything. people mostly don't care enough. like not adding
a fully copy of the GPL.

if you buy some router running Linux you will get with it a printed
copy of the GPL. if you download randomsoftware-1.0.tar.gz which is
entirely GPL you have a good chance of not finding a full copy
anywhere.

git hooks certainly would improve the situation. but at the same time
it will not solve the underlying issue, so I am reasonable certain
that some people's approach to a failed audit on licensing will be to
simply replace whatever license was rejected with one that will not
get rejected even if doing so actually violates the original license.

but as mentioned, the 90% that are easily parsed because they use
standard license formatting etc are not really the problem (short of
forgetting to include a GPL copy) it's the other 10% of random source
copies or whatever.

oh and on that note... an audit on full-license-copy-present actually
would be nice, so it is harder to forget adding the full license copy
;)

HS