svn commit: r345472 - in head/mail: mmr smtpfeed

[Alexey Dokuchaev]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 08:28:33AM -0400, Eitan Adler wrote:
> On 11 March 2014 02:37, Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 07:43:09PM -0400, Eitan Adler wrote:
> >> LICENSE= is largely useless for actual lawyers,
> >
> > Can you elaborate on this a bit, for those of us who didn't get their
> > feet wet in the legal pool?
> 
> I am not a laywer and don't give legal advice.  However, LEGAL can not
> be trusted as a source of licensing information.

Right, but LEGAL is another beast, and only loosely related to LICENSE
framework (most of the ports do not get an entry there at all).  By saying
"legal pool" I was not referring to our LEGAL file.

> For example, BSD style licensees require attribution but who to
> attribute is not listed.

Yes, this constitutes the first important question: do we need (and if we
do, how) to properly reflect copyright (authorship) and distribution terms
(license), and relationship thereof.  There are several opinions that were
raised before, from "drop LICENSE_FILE for anything well-known like BSD,
GPLvX or MIT" through "BSD, unlike GPL, requires attribution, so we ought
to set LICENSE_FILE for BSD, but not for GPL", and "LICENSE_FILE should be
always set".

All of these are IANAL-type of opinions, and result in nothing but arguing
on the lists (myself included).

> > If some well-defined terms of some license can be abbreviated as, say,
> > GPLv2, why do we have to provide a full copy in every individual port?
> 
> I did not say that LICENSE_FILE must always be installed. If the
> license is byte-for-byte identical to the template, a symlink is fine.

Yes, this is one of the common judgments.  It raises even more questions:
how do deal with CR/LF, typos, inadvertent changes, and other effects of
the fact that upstream lacks a lawyer in 99% cases?  What if COPYING file
is slightly different from license header in *.c files?  There are a lot
of possible complications here, leaving aside that technically the whole
process of "byte-for-byte verification" should be somehow legally-blessed
as well.

But we're even worse than that: I cannot find a single symlink under
/usr/local/share/licenses; yet there are tons of small files that tell me
to go "read from the web". o_O

> >> but setting LICENSE_FILE can be kind of helpful.
> >
> > Shouldn't "Kind of" sound too vague to actual lawyers? :)
> 
> I have never gone through the process of license compliance.  From
> chatting with others who have, I am told that setting LICENSE_FILE can
> help with a first pass or some of the basic automatic work.

Methinks we have a larger problem to worry about rather than automating
work.  To start with, there is no clear distinction between copyright and
license.  I don't know if it can be legally secured for us to augment our
standard Ports Tree disclaimer to acknowledge copyright for all the ports'
respective owners, but if would help us to stop worrying about attribution
in the licenses' text, that would be awesome: allow us to install a link
to a verified, verbatim copy (or copies, per different licenses) and ease
the burden of byte-for-byte comparison. :)

./danfe