Re: bzip2-testing LICENSE

[Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org>]

Hi Randy,

On Tue, 2020-05-26 at 16:35 -0400, Randy MacLeod wrote:
> I've been reviewing the work that Rahul has done to package
> bzip2-testing for Yocto / Open Embedded. One question that I have
> is about the license terms of the repo. In brief it seems
> that the COPYING/LICENSE files are left over from the original
> projects and that it's possible that since the remaining
> files are data rather than source

You are right. For the purpose of the bzip2-testing project the only
"source" is the test runner script run-tests.sh. Everything else can be
seen as data. The top-level README file does explain:

   This is a collection of "interesting" .bz2 files that can be used to
   test bzip2 works correctly. They come from different projects.

   Each directory should contain a README file explaining where the
   .bz2 files originally came from. Plus a reference to the (Free
   Software) license that the project files were distributed under.

> If you agree, then I'd be happy to send a commit to remove
> the license files in the sub-directories and include a nice long
> explanation in the commit log based on the email referenced above.
> If not that's certainly fine as well but I would be puzzled by such
> a result! :)

But I would like to keep the subdir README files and the license files
that describe how those projects distributed their data (and code).
Even if we are only redistributing the data files from those projects
it seems more correct to keep the license files and copyright claims.

Even if we did claim all the data files are not copyrightable and we
don't need a license, we already have a license that allows the using,
sharing and modification of the data. Having explicit permission to
redistribute these file seems a good thing. Even if some people might
claim we don't need any such permission in the first place. And it just
seems polite to mention the origins and the terms people made these
files available under.

Cheers,

Mark