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

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 12:12:54PM -0500, Greg Hendershott wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 10:51 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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.)

It would be great if most file formats for object code, binaries, 
source  ode, repositories, generated bytecode, debs, etc., had an 
official metadata field for copyright information.

Compilers and linkers would propagate this information.

Then you could run a standard utility and have it tell you about all 
the declared licences in whatever package you're running.

It'll probably take a long time before it's into ELF or DWARF files, 
but maybe Racket could start the ball rolling?

-- hendrik