The MIT license says "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." where Software refers to the "software and associated documentation files".
If I use a MIT library in my statically linked application, is it OK to put the license text inside as an ELF section called "license" or similar? Or do I even need to include the license text at all if only parts of the library is used in my application?
I'm a bit confused since the musl library for example, which uses the MIT license, makes a big thing that applications can be easily statically linked and distributed as a single file. On https://www.musl-libc.org/intro.html we have:
Using musl maximizes application deployability. Its permissive MIT license is compatible with all FOSS licenses, static-linking-friendly, and makes commercial use painless too. Binaries statically linked with musl have no external dependencies, even for features like DNS lookups or character set conversions that are implemented with dynamic loading on glibc. An application can really be deployed as a single binary file and run on any machine with the appropriate instruction set architecture and Linux kernel or Linux syscall ABI emulation layer.
A separate license file would not make it a single file deployment.
The slides at https://elinux.org/images/e/eb/Transitioning_From_uclibc_to_musl_for_Embedded_Development.pdf written by the musl author says
Permissive license means you can make static-linked binaries without license-conformance concerns.
If I really need to include the license text somewhere, couldn't that be called a concern?