GPLv3-licensed ports

[Garrett Cooper]

On May 19, 2010, at 11:54 AM, Charlie Kester wrote:

> On Wed 19 May 2010 at 05:10:49 PDT jhell wrote:
>> Adding to this bundle of madness...
>> 
>> I believe that it would be best practice to keep ports/LEGAL up-to-date
>> with this list.
>> 
>> Those who already have ports on a machine may find it more usefull to
>> find them there.
>> 
>> Quoting ports/LEGAL:
>> "Some of the ports in this directory have restrictive copyrights" and
>> GPLv3 I believe certainly would fall under that category.
> 
> Yes, I don't what the original legal concerns were that led to the wiki
> page, but I know that many FreeBSD users are wary of GPLv3.  So it makes
> sense to let them know which ports are licensed that way.
> 
> After checking the COPYING files, some more of my ports for the list:
> 
> devel/gengetopt
> devel/libYGP
> sysutils/iextract
> sysutils/gaffitter
> 
> The ports in the devel category are especially noteworthy, since (if I understand correctly) their license will infect anything
> built with them.
> 
> Is ports/LEGAL prominent enough?  Should I also add something to the pkg-descr?


	As an end-user I don't care about GPLv3 other than from a philosophical stance; but using GPLv3 with FreeBSD as an employee is a non-starter, so that's a good primary reason for the wiki page I think.
	This data should really be inside the Makefile or something similar to CATEGORIES, etc like Gentoo Linux does (at least you know what you're getting before you install a package or port). That way other non-permissive licenses could be audited before the package is installed and someone could make a decision as to whether or not they can install it either because of licensing constraints, export issues, or the like...
Thanks,
-Garrett