Policy on new ports

[Fabian Keil]

"Atz-Soft" <atz at atz-soft.com> wrote:

> I'd be interested in the policy about new ports in the following situation:
> 
> The program has the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
> Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option)
> any later version.
> The program is not in the FreeBSD ports system but can be compiled on
> FreeBSD without problems with approx. 5 commands.
> And because of that the author may not want his program in the ports
> collection.

Is that an assumption or do you really know someone who
first uses a free license and then objects to people
distributing his program in compliance with that license?

I would assume that most authors are either glad that
someone considers their program worthy enough to create
a port for it, or just don't care.

> So will the program be added even if the author may disagree with that?

Usually the author isn't asked for his opinion, if the license
allows distribution, it's assumed that the author is ok with it.

I don't know if there ever was a situation where the
author of a GPL'ed program asked to remove it from the
ports collection again, but in my opinion such requests
should be ignored. If the author doesn't want distribution
he shouldn't use a license that allows it.

Fabian
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