GPLv3-licensed ports

[Garrett Cooper]

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Indi <thebeelzebubtrigger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 04:51:30PM -0700, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> On May 19, 2010, at 11:54 AM, Charlie Kester wrote:
>> >
>> > 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...
>
> I'd go a step beyond that and suggest that GPL-licensed ports should
> have an EULA requiring the user to type yes or no, like parts of java
> and some other restrictively-licensed things.

    No .. that will never fly with the number of ports in the ports
tree that are GPL licensed; I find the downloading the other accept
before continuing logic to be highly counterproductive when
downloading and installing ports, and I sure others do as well. It
would be considerably more convenient if there was a license signoff
for certain items because it would make things less of a PITA.

    Looking at pkgsrc, they have a variable per-Makefile, LICENSE.
Determining what license a port is distributed under would be
considerably easier. Also, if someone wanted to block all GPLv3 ports,
they could effectively look for GPLv3 ports like so:

.if defined(LICENSE) && ${LICENSE} == "GPLV3"
.error "GPLv3 licensed ports blocked due to site policy"
.endif

    in make.conf, etc (or ports.conf like some folks have lightly
tossed around on #bsdports and elsewhere).
Thanks,
-Garrett