new port license question:

[Chad Perrin]

On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 08:42:04PM -0500, Michael Scheidell wrote:
> I am working on committing a new port;
> 
> <http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/163698>
> ports/163698: new port graphics/py-stl (deprecates graphics/stl2pov)
> 
> submitted by the author of py-stl.
> 
> inside his man page, he has this:
> 
> The latest version of this program is available at:
> .Lk http://rsmith.home.xs4all.nl/software/
> .Sh LICENSE
> To the extent possible under law, Roland Smith has waived all copyright and
> related or neighboring rights to this manual. This work is published
> from the
> Netherlands. See
> .Lk http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
> 
> Do I need to add a 'LICENSE= BSD' in the makefile, or just leave it?

No -- the license in this case is not one of the several BSD licenses.
It is in fact the CC0 License, which offers as its first step an attempt
to disclaim all copyright restrictions and claims.  Because this is a
very problematic thing to try to do internationally (a lot of
jurisdictions have no legal concept of disclaiming copyright or
dedication to the public domain before copyright term expires on its
own), CC0 goes on to explicitly set forth license terms that come about
as close to public domain as humanly possible.

Saying "LICENSE=BSD" in the makefile would be inaccurate and confusing.
Indicate the actual license.  If I had to guess, that would mean
"LICENSE=CC0", but rather than guess you should look into whether there's
already a precedent set for how to refer to the CC0 license in FreeBSD
port makefiles.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]