[racket] [racket-dev] Too many license files

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> Yes, the duplicate files bother me, too. I think removing the
> duplicates will require yet another little twist in the package system
> (since the files originate from individual packages), so we've left
> them for now.

At Fri, 21 Feb 2014 11:45:50 -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> I'm not a lawyer, but I figured that, for most packages I author, I
> probably don't *need* to include the full text of a well-known license
> (e.g., LGPLv3).  Instead, I give the copyright notice, state that the
> license using the recognized full name of the license (and a URL), and
> then some disclaimers.

Speaking of referencing rather than copying licenses, and third party pkgs:

It would be helpful for some sort of canonical license ID or URI to be
part of the official metadata in info.rkt and on pkgs.racket-lang.org.

That way someone could filter packages by license when browsing the
pkg web site.

Also, it could enable `raco pkg` (or a third-party utility) to do a
license compatibility check down the dependency chain.

Even just "license missing" would be helpful to know, transitively.
Plus there's license compatibility. (That taxonomy or permissiveness
ordinality doesn't necessarily need to be baked into the license URIs;
it could come from elsewhere, but use the URIs.)