Recently, I tentatively added OpenImageIO support to my project - an image and panorama viewer. OpenImageIO is quickly evolving, and the package shipping with Ubuntu 20.04 is missing several features I'd like to see in the AppImage. So I built OpenImageIO from source and installed to /usr/local. Then I built the appimage and scanned the AppDir to see if the copyright for OpenImageIO was present - it wasn't. A bit of digging revealed that the copyright information is gathered by using dpkg-query - but that would only produce copyright information for packages which are installed on the system with the package manager. When I looked at the output of the build process, I noticed quite a few more WARNING messages - likely due to the fact that I also built some of OpenImageIO's dependencies from source (stuff like OpenVC and openexr).

Nevertheless, I got an AppImage which works just fine - the libraries and binary are all there - but OpenImageIO, for example, is now licensed under Apache 2 which requires people who distribute it in object format to 'give' a copy of the license to the recipient, and distributing an AppImage is certainly distributing the library in object form.

So I'm a bit at a loss what to do. I imagine I could try and gather all the copyright and licensing information 'manually' and somehow incorporate it into the AppDir, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a tool which automates the process. Can someone here give me advice on how to get the copyright info into the AppImage?