Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Tue Jan 17 19:46:45 UTC 2012
On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:38:08AM -0800, Doug Barton wrote:
>> On 01/17/2012 03:56, Vitaly Magerya wrote:
>>> Eitan Adler wrote:
>>>>> 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-)
>>>>
>>>> Yes
>>>
>>> Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of
>>> target timeline?
>>>
>>> Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression
>>> was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that
>>> chapter is written...
>>
>> Personally I think we should scrap the whole thing. It is an interesting
>> idea, but the implementation has never fleshed out. It's also completely
>> unclear what any of it means from an actual legal standpoint, and
>> personally I'm not convinced that we aren't making things worse for the
>> project by doing this.
>
> How? I don't see the problem that makes things worse, I guess.
In my not-a-lawyer view, I wonder if it puts some responsibility for
accurately representing a license on FreeBSD and the ports system. "We
used this software because the FreeBSD ports system said the license was
compatible for our use. Now it turns out otherwise, and we have
millions in damages..."
There's the potential for someone to intentionally put the wrong license
in a port to create such a situation. And to protect against that, will
committers have to verify the license?
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