License Framework: Develop Best Practices

[Erwin Lansing]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 10:48:14AM -0700, Micheas Herman wrote:
> > 
> > I don't think the FreeBSD project could afford to have this license
> > cataloging scheme regularly inspected by appropriate legal counsel for
> > each of the various different jurisdictions around the world and for
> > them to approve it as accurate and legally watertight.
> 
>         I think that FreeBSD should piggy back on the OSI and just list
>         the following licenses:
>         http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical plus "other".

Using the list from OSI or NetBSD or similar would be a good way do an
initial population of the file.
>         
>         This could be a filter of sorts for those that want it. IANAL
>         but just listing the license should not be more or less risky
>         for the project than distributing the source code, and it might
>         even reduce the risk of distributing pre compiled binaries as
>         there is at least a good faith effort to comply with the
>         license(s) and make it easy for the end user to be aware of the
>         license(s) of the code.
> 
We already have a mechanism to prevent distribution distfiles and
packages on our mirrors with the current NO_CDROM, RESTRICTED and
NO_PACKAGE flags.  The license framework is ment to make these more
finegrained and give endusers a better handle to avoid using specific
licenses.  As you say, this does not change that it will be done on a
best effort basis, which may, or may not, be good enough for your
specific use case, but it does provide better control.

-erwin

-- 
Erwin Lansing                                   http://droso.org
Prediction is very difficult
especially about the future                    erwin at FreeBSD.org
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