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.
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.