Drop of portindex

[Robin Schoonover]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 18:33:54 +0200
Michael Nottebrock <michaelnottebrock at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
> Yes, that concerns me as well. One thing that surely can be learnt
> from this episode is that ports committers (not excluding myself here)
> need to be more careful about the licensing situation of software
> before committing it to ports (I was told previous version of
> portindex had stuff like "(c) 2004 Radim Kolar, GPL"  in one source
> file and "public domain" in another, but no general license attached
> to the whole package).
> 

Just to continue the confusion, (on his site) he also listed the
software on his site as being distributed as "Open Source" with a link
to the OSI site. 

> I'm not saying we need to go debian on the ports-tree and waste
> valuable time doing endless licensing reviews and ridiculous debating,
> but things like portindex clearly must not be committed that easily in
> the future.
> 

I think it was alright for it to be commited to the ports tree. However,
software included in the ports tree should stay recognized as 3rd party
software and inclusion is subject to change.  Also, we should be more
careful on what allow ourselves to mirror.  I don't think that fact that
a lack of License prevents distribution is noticed enough.  We easily
enough notice when some Company X decides to port a product/release
source to FreeBSD (or Linux) and explcitely requests that it not be
redistributed, but we didn't notice this.

I think we may want to record what the license for the port is in the
Makefile.  For example:

LICENSE=	GPL

If multiple parts are somehow under multiple licenses, we could also do:

LICENSE=	GPL BSD

For things like what we have with portindex, we'd do:

LICENSE=	unknown

and warn that the license to redistribute the required tarballs is
unknown.  (Also, don't mirror on ftp.freebsd.org in this case)

It's just something to chew on.  (I think netbsd's pkgsrc might already
do something like this).

-- 
Robin Schoonover (aka End)
# "He dropped his voice still lower. In the stillness, a fly 
# would not have dared cleat its throat."
#                -- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy