6 License commands

These commands display licenses and license notices. Licenses are the full terms and conditions, while notices are simply disclaimers about which license is being used. Some licenses are small enough to not require a license notice.

There could be a slight delay in the operation of these commands because licenses and license notices are fetched on-demand from the www.gnu.org or www.fsf.org websites.

Each of these license commands provides one or more license keywords to the choose command. To see the license keywords that a command provides, run ‘licensing COMMAND --list-license-notices’. For example:

$ licensing gpl --list-license-notices
gplv3+,full-license
gplv2+,full-license
gplv1+,full-license
gplv3+
gplv3,no-later
gplv2+
gplv2,no-later
gplv1+
gplv1,no-later
gplv1,no-later,mass
gplv1+,mass
gplv2,no-later,temple
gplv2+,temple
gplv2,no-later,franklin
gplv2+,franklin
gplv3,no-later,franklin
gplv3+,franklin

This example shows the licensing keywords that the gpl command provides to the choose command. When a license is not recommended, the --force option must be used. For example:

$ licensing choose gplv3,no-later
choose: `gplv3,no-later' is unrecommended!  Use --force, or maybe try `gplv3+'

Although the GNU General Public License version 3 is a fine license, it is not recommended to remove the Or any later version clause because future improvements to the GPL cannot be automatically granted.

The ,franklin, and ,temple texts refer to mailing addresses for the Free Software Foundation. Nowadays most projects forego the mailing address for a hypertext link.