Re: [yocto] what is the proper treatment of the "Unlicense" license?

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>]

On Wed, 13 May 2020, Quentin Schulz wrote:

> On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 08:40:28AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > On Wed, 13 May 2020, Quentin Schulz wrote:
> >
> > > Hi Robert,
> > >
> > > On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 07:19:59AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > > On Wed, 13 May 2020, Richard Leitner wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:39:44PM +0200, Quentin Schulz wrote:
> > > > > > On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 06:25:01AM -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > ...
> > > > >
> > > > > > If it's really widely used, maybe something to add to
> > > > > > openembedded-core/files/common-licenses/ ? So that you don't need any of
> > > > > > the suggested ways?
> > > > >
> > > > > +1 for adding Unlicense to openembedded-core's common-licenses
> > > >
> > > >   as long as this requires only adding an Unlicense file to that
> > > > directory, i can do that shortly.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure, but there might be a need to add it to
> > > SRC_DISTRIBUTE_LICENSES in
> > > openembedded-core/meta/conf/licenses.conf.
> >
> >   that variable is gone:
> >
> >   commit 64daaf29e2c12c8b587bafdebf9409433187ddf7
> >   Author: Peter Kjellerstedt <peter.kjellerstedt@axis.com>
> >   Date:   Wed Dec 11 17:48:14 2019 +0100
> >
> >     licenses.conf: Remove the SRC_DISTRIBUTE_LICENSES variable
> >
> >     The SRC_DISTRIBUTE_LICENSES variable and its static list of licenses
> >     has been replaced by AVAILABLE_LICENSES, which automatically contains
> >     all available licenses.
> >
> >
>
> That'll teach me to check in master instead of my release of Yocto :)

  it gets weirder ... the project i'm working with is based on morty
so that variable *would* still be relevant, but even adding
"Unlicense" to that variable didn't stop the offending recipe
from still generating a warning. so i thought, "i wonder if there are
any other recipes in the layers i'm working with that have
'Unlicense," and sure enough, there's one: pyelftools (created
in-house).

  so i added pyelftools to the image i'm building, but *that* recipe
*didn't* generate a warning, so now i'm thoroughly baffled. and,
finally, i decided to check the current state of pyelftools to see
what its licensing is, and in meta-python, we have the recipe
python3-pyelftools_0.25.bb, wherein we read:

LICENSE = "PD"

  argh ... and if one checks OE/meta/files/common-licenses, there is
indeed a license file named "PD" whose contents are simply:

This is a placeholder for the Public Domain License

so now i'm not sure if a "Unlicense" license file is redundant or
what.

  i'm confused.

rday