LICENSE questions

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi--

On Jun 14, 2010, at 4:10 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
> On 06/14/10 09:59, Chuck Swiger wrote:
>> On Jun 14, 2010, at 1:07 AM, Doug Barton wrote:
>>> I'm working on adding LICENSE information to my ports, and have a
>>> few questions. A lot of my ports are ISC products, and they have
>>> the following: http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/COPYRIGHT.txt
>> 
>> Yes, that's the ISC license,
>> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/isc-license.txt.
> 
> Right-O, so can we/I add that to ports/Mk/bsd.license*?

+1 to that.  (ISC isn't extremely common, but it's not rare, and a bunch of commonly used ports do use it.)

>>> I also have dns/fpdns which has this:
>>> http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/LICENSE.txt which looks like it
>>> could be BSD, but I'm not sure. I also have several others in this
>>> category.
>> 
>> That's a 3-clause BSD license variant.
> 
> Yeah, I guess I didn't ask my question properly. :)  Can I use just "BSD" for the license in these cases, or is there a need for us to differentiate between this BSD license and the now-standard 2-clause version?

The main distinction which matters for BSD licenses is whether the "acknowledgement" clause (aka clause 3 of the 4-clause license from FreeBSD's /COPYRIGHT) is present, since that makes it not miscible with GPLv2.

In your particular case, you don't have the "acknowledgement" clause.

>>> net-mgmt/p5-Net-IP has http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/COPYING.txt
>>> which could fall into the "perl" category, except there isn't one.
>>> :)
>> 
>> Many Perl things are licensed under the same terms as Perl itself;
>> ie, dual-licensed under the GPL & Artistic license.  (The latter
>> license is not well-written, and should be deprecated-- the GPL does
>> a better job.)
> 
> My vote would be that we add a "PERL" category, but maybe there is a reason not to do this?

Considering that there are ~4000 p5 ports, it seems reasonable to indicate that they are licensed under the same terms as Perl itself.  Similar arguments might be made for Python or Ruby, but I'm not sure they're as common.

>> [ ...quoted-printable mangling deleted... ]
>> That's a MIT/X11 license minus the all-caps DISCLAIMER.
> 
> Oy, ok, so how do I classify it? Or am I correct in assuming we do not yet have a category for it?

I see "MIT" listed, although I would describe it more precisely as the MIT/X11 variant rather than a pure MIT license.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck