5.25.2. Providing License Text

One requirement that is often overlooked is inclusion of license text. This requirement also needs to be dealt with prior to generating the final image. Some licenses require the license text to accompany the binary. You can achieve this by adding the following to your local.conf file:

     COPY_LIC_MANIFEST = "1"
     COPY_LIC_DIRS = "1"
     LICENSE_CREATE_PACKAGE = "1"
                

Adding these statements to the configuration file ensures that the licenses collected during package generation are included on your image.

Note

Setting all three variables to "1" results in the image having two copies of the same license file. One copy resides in /usr/share/common-licenses and the other resides in /usr/share/license.

The reason for this behavior is because COPY_LIC_DIRS and COPY_LIC_MANIFEST add a copy of the license when the image is built but do not offer a path for adding licenses for newly installed packages to an image. LICENSE_CREATE_PACKAGE adds a separate package and an upgrade path for adding licenses to an image.

As the source archiver has already archived the original unmodified source that contains the license files, you would have already met the requirements for inclusion of the license information with source as defined by the GPL and other open source licenses.