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I want to check what licenses all the packages on my system is running under.

It seems like this information is located in /usr/share/doc/package/copyright

However this file seems like it does not have any standard format, I've been going through this manually to record the licenses. is there another way to get this information, through something like dpkg-query?

Pratik Amin
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  • Why do you need this? – Zoredache Nov 23 '11 at 19:28
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    Package licensing is far to complex for a simple answer single per-package answer. Some packages, are covered by many licenses, some use non-standard licenses. Do check out http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ – Zoredache Nov 23 '11 at 19:33

1 Answers1

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The answer to this question suggests that automatically pulling the license info out of a single .deb package is non-trivial.

I suspect there is no easy way to do what you want.

Since the answer I linked to has been updated, I'll update mine too.

This is beginning to change, as the debian/copyright file is now required to be machine-interpretable, so you can look forward to this in the future.

Community
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Ladadadada
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