Re: additional license file in libffi source distribution?

[Anthony Green <green at moxielogic dot com>]

I agree that these license scanning tools are problematic.   Fossology is
the one I'm familiar with, and it really dumbs things down to the point
that it is pretty much useless.  I hate the fact that I've even considered
removing GPL build-time tools in order to cater to these broken scanners.
I've reached out to Fossology a few times, but no response to date.

AG


On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 12:22 PM, Kaz Kylheku (libffi) <
382-725-6798@kylheku.com> wrote:

> On 2018-05-01 05:09, Bruno Haible wrote:
>
>> Hi Anthony,
>>
>> msvcc.sh and
>>> testsuite/libffi.bhaible are both covered by licensing terms that are
>>> different from the libffi license, and that we need to (a) remove them,
>>> or
>>> (b) include the license text.
>>>
>>
>> Correct. Including the license text is sufficient because
>>   - build tools like msvcc.sh do not store copyrightable contents in the
>>     generated binaries,
>>   - the presence or absence of a test suite does not have an effect on the
>>     generated binaries.
>>
>
> I think the combination is a bad idea.
>
> Organizations nowadays use scanning tools to classify the license of
> packages. If you have a GPL in there anywhere, the package may be falsely
> classified as GPL and people will leave it at that.
>
> Someone's program will end up being falsely regarded as "radioactive"
> because it depends on libffi.
>
> Nobody is going to manually inspect thousands of packages to pick apart
> which one of the included licenses actually applies to the executables.
>
>