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licensingdpkgdeb

license info of a deb package

I am trying to get license information of uninstalled deb packages.
dpkg --info <package-name>.deb does not give that information.
Is there any command in ubuntu which will give this info?
(In rpm world rpm -qpi gives that info)

Solution

  • There's no simple command that I know of. You can do something like this:

    dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile foo.deb |tar -xvO ./usr/share/doc/foo/copyright

    This prints the file to standard output.

    Edit Hmm, that sounds hard. After a quick perusal of the apt cache on my Debian system, I found some phrases that might be useful:

    • "GNU General Public License"
    • "the above copyright notice and this permission notice", making sure you unwrap lines first

    • "/usr/share/common-licenses/*"

      This seems to be the closest to a standard license you'll get, but be careful since often the packaging is under a common-license, but the package contents are under a separate license.

    • ^License: MPL-1.1 | GPL-2+ | Apache-2.0

    However, some packages (ImageMagick) simply have a free-form license in the copyright file that doesn't really conform to any stock license, except that someone considered it DFSG-approved.

    Update 2012: 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.