On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 01:36:04PM -0700, Soren Jacobsen wrote:
> On 08/11 12:13, D. E. Evans wrote:
> > What are the "free licenses" that the bsd.pkg.defaults.mk
> > considers automatically acceptable?  BSD and GPL are listed, but
> > obviously there are some others.  I would guess the X11 license
> > is one.  Even those of us who do not have GNU style ranting running 
> > in our blood would find this clarification important.  Otherwise,
> > licenses are being agreed to without knowing what they are.
> 
> Anything not in pkgsrc/licenses/ is acceptable to pkgsrc.
>  
> > My original question was not directly answered, but it seems that
> > the answer is that there is no way to reject licenses that are
> > already accepted as "free licenses" by the pkg system.
> > Personally, I would like to think that only the BSD license is
> > acceptable, and that all other licenses should have an
> > ACCEPTABLE_LICENSE entry in the .mk file.  Since the base system
> > includes the GPL, and the X11 license (when installing XFree86),
> > these licenses should be listed as acceptable by default, but
> > still be required to have an ACCEPTABLE_LICENSE entry.
> 
> Correct, there is no way to reject any such "free licenses." This is
> because, presently, pkgsrc only takes note of licenses thar are deemed
> too restrictive. That is, the package maintainer must notice that the
> software has a license that would obviously be considered inappropriate
> in the eyes of some users, and then set the LICENSE variable
> appropriately.
> 
> For users to be able to filter out GPL packages, for instance, would
> require a copy of the GPL in pkgsrc/licenses/ (I think there should be a
> copy regardless) and all GPLed software in pkgsrc to be marked as such
> with the addition of "LICENSE=gpl" to their Makefiles.  This would be a
> rather large effort, but one that would likely be appreciated by at
> least a few people.

FYI, we looked at doing that just recently, but concluded that it
would be too much effort for too little gain.

If you'd like to do it, it would be great, but it's a lot to ask of
anyone.

Regards,
Alistair