Drop of portindex

[Gary Kline]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 05:56:15PM -0600, Robin Schoonover wrote:
> 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).
> 

	My dime's worth is that this may be an A+ idea.  Bg: around
	5 years ago I talked to thr author of "xv" who said he was
	making around $100K/year from his work.  That was why I
	licensed my misc/muuz differently.  <<what? me greedy??>>
	Nutshell is that I've gone back to the GPL.  But yes,
	people can chance their mind whenever.  Those who initially
	go GPL or GPL/BSD or BSD are likely to be gung-ho open 
	source and willing to share back.  (Apologies for my 
	temp lapse.)

	Other than making people sign their name in blood.... (??)

	gary


-- 
   Gary Kline     kline at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix