LICENSE_FLAGS, a replacement for COMMERCIAL_LICENSE, v3

From: Tom Zanussi <[email protected]>

This patchset is a replacement for COMMERCIAL_LICENSE called LICENSE_FLAGS.

Please see the commit message for '[PATCH 1/5] base.bbclass: add support
for LICENSE_FLAGS' for an explanation of the LICENSE_FLAGS mechanism.

v3 changes:

- add back an accidentally-stripped comment in PATCH 1.

v2 changes, reflecting comments from Phil Blundell and Paul Eggleton:

- This version converts all the existing packages listed in COMMERCIAL_LICENSE to the equivalent "commercial_${PN}" LICENSE_FLAGS. This allows each package to be added to or removed from the whitelist instead of the previously too-broad 'Commercial' flags for those packages.

- Changes all values to lowercase.

- The new commit message should explain the mechanism and how it can be used a little better.

For some background on these changes, the original proposal for the functionality covered by this replacement was drafted by Saul Wold - the relevant details of that proposal are copied below:

***

There has been some issues raised with the initial implementation of COMMERCIAL_LICENSE and we are looking for ways to address this. Currently COMMERCIAL_LICENSE (C_L) is defined in default-distrovars.conf to contain a list of packages that have additional license requirements when used commercially (such as royalty requirements, or acknowledging some type of commercial T&Cs). These packages are skipped during parsing.

It currently contains a number of Audio and Video packages that require additional licensing terms when used commercially. As we add additional layers, some of these layers want to add additional package to the C_L list, but how to easily enable them.

Since local.conf, where you would normally override things like this, is read in before base.bbclass, which contains tools like oe_filter_out() to modify lists, we can't use that mechanism.

That's the background, now for the proposal.

Do away with C_L and C_*_PLUGINS, move to a "Named Bit Flag" list in LICENSE_FLAGS, each recipe can then maintain their flags directly, instead of in a shared location like default-distrovars.conf.

LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST would be set in local.conf with the values that are acceptable to include in this image, by default it would be blank.

Possible values for LICENSE_FLAGS could be:
- Binary - provides some kind of binary with no source
- Patent - provides a potential infringing item, that some may not want
- Commercial - include recipes that may have commercial T&C
- Commercial_${PN} - commercial licenses specific to ${PN}
- License_${PN} - include a recipe that has a specific license
- maybe similar or different than Commercial_${PN}

***

[T&C = Terms and Conditions]

[NOTE: the above are only 'possible values' that particular license flags could take. The above are not proposals for specific flags that will be implemented - it's completely up to the package maintainers to define appropriate flags for their packages.]

Note that there's no policy attached to any of the above license types
- this is simply string-matching that can be used for the purpose of screening packages - if the strings match, the recipe gets in, if not, it doesn't i.e. during parsing, we would inspect the recipe's data for LICENSE_FLAGS and if it has a value then try to match against the WHITELIST - if it matches it gets added to the parsed list, if there is no match then it gets Skip_Package()'ed.

The following changes since commit 468998cddbe1a803096c9b357e1b5daa3b7e8c2e:
Dongxiao Xu (1):
command.py: add parseConfigurationFiles API

are available in the git repository at:

git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky-contrib.git tzanussi/license-flags.v3
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi//log/?h=tzanussi/license-flags.v3

Tom Zanussi (5):
base.bbclass: add support for LICENSE_FLAGS
Add LICENSE_FLAGS to packages mentioned in COMMERCIAL_LICENSE base.bbclass: remove COMMERCIAL_LICENSE code default-distrovars.inc: remove COMMERCIAL_LICENSE et al documentation-audit.sh: remove COMMERCIAL_LICENSE warning

 meta/classes/base.bbclass                          |   24 +++++++++++++++-----
 meta/conf/distro/include/default-distrovars.inc    |    5 ----
 .../gstreamer/gst-fluendo-mp3_0.10.16.bb           |    1 +
 .../gstreamer/gst-openmax_0.10.1.bb                |    1 +
 .../gstreamer/gst-plugins-ugly_0.10.18.bb          |    1 +
 meta/recipes-multimedia/lame/lame_3.99.3.bb        |    2 +
 meta/recipes-multimedia/libmad/libmad_0.15.1b.bb   |    1 +
 meta/recipes-multimedia/libomxil/libomxil_0.9.3.bb |    1 +
 meta/recipes-multimedia/mpeg2dec/mpeg2dec_0.4.1.bb |    1 +
 meta/recipes-qt/qt-apps/qmmp_0.5.2.bb              |    1 +
 scripts/contrib/documentation-audit.sh             |    3 +-
 11 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-)