License files

[Jason Grout]

I'm building some conda packages, and was curious about how conda packages typically follow this restriction in the BSD license:

"2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution."

I read that as the license file should be included in the conda package.  I checked a few BSD conda packages and didn't find any license files.  (They do contain a reference to the license type in the info/meta file, though.)  I did find some references to something to do with licenses by running conda info -l, which indicated something about "License directories" (but they are empty or don't exist on my system).

How do conda packages satisfy the requirement above from the BSD license?

Thanks,

Jason

[Ilan Schnell]

The "conda info -l" command has nothing to do with these human readable license text files.  It lists the locations in which licenses key files are being installed, e.g. for IOPro or NumbaPro (commercial Continuum products which require a license key file in order to function).

The easiest thing to satisfy the requirement of the BSD license would be to copy the license text file from the source directory into the install prefix.  For example you can add (to build.sh):

cp LICENSE.txt $SP_DIR/numpy/

Ideally the setup.py would already so something similar.
The short answer is that conda (really conda-build) does not treat license text files in any special way, and that the conda recipe author has to make sure the license text file gets included into the package.

- Ilan

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[Martijn]

I have a similar question as Jason. I am not interested in building a package myself but just want to understand open source licences and their requirements. Ilan said "(..) conda recipe author has to make sure the license text file gets included into the package.". For the default installation (python3, win64) most folders in C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\Lib\site-packages (e.g. the numpy directory) do not contain a license file, while it is my understanding that it should to fullfill (e.g.) the BSD requirements. Do i then understand correctly that the recipe author of the default installation did not fullfill the BSD requirements? This seems strange to me.

Greetings,

Martijn

Op woensdag 12 augustus 2015 23:47:49 UTC+2 schreef Ilan:

[Kale]

Hey Martijn,

I think we're actually ok still.  What we distribute as a package is a .tar.bz2 file.  These are certainly binary files, and almost never an exact replica of the source code.  Within that .tar.bz2 file that must be downloaded as a whole to install the package is an 'info' directory which contains all of the package's metadata.  If you want to check the info directory of a package yourself without extracting it yourself manually, it will typically be located for your in the 'C:\Program Files\Anaconda3\pkgs\' directory.  The license file will/should always be contained within that 'info' directory if the package maintainer has created the package correctly.

Kale

[Kale]

BTW, also contained within the 'info' directory are the full details of the build process used to make the package.