On Fri, May 05, 2017 at 02:28:34PM -0400, Randy Barlow wrote:
I liked Miro's suggestion of hardlinking the licenses, but it's important to sure they are actually identical with checksums (i.e., don't just use the License field because what if the upstream project subtly adjusted the license file?)
Right, it would be necessary for someone maintaining a package to verify that what looks like a common license actually matches the reference copy. (I don't know if Debian does this.) In some cases, non-identical files could be determined nonetheless to match according to some criteria. As an example, the GitHub 'choose-a-license' feature seems to be resulting in a class of noncanonical common license texts that differ from the real authentic copy only in nonsubstantive ways (e.g. whitespace).
Richard