Re: Handling licenses

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Jul 09, 2016 at 01:10:31PM +0200, Roland Illig wrote:
 > Quoting http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/fixes.html#handling-licenses:
 > > The pkgsrc system, as a policy choice, does not label packages
 > > which have licenses that are Free or Open Source.
 > 
 > This seems to contradict the current pkglint behavior, which says that
 > ?Every package must define its LICENSE?. Since the text from the pkgsrc
 > guide is 9 years old, is it still up-to-date?

Yes...? Every package is supposed to declare its license, and the
licenses we know about are in licenses/. The policy choice is that we
don't decide which of those are Free.

 > Also, the pkgsrc guide does not give helpful instructions on determining
 > which license a package has. Do we have some tool that I can feed a
 > given COPYING file into, and it tells me which of the predefined
 > licenses it is? Recognizing the GNU GPL is easy, since it says so, but
 > choosing between the various BSD licenses requires reading the whole
 > text, as far as I know.

If you can't tell or aren't sure, post and ask for opinions. If it has
its own thing, well, that's why licences/ has a lot of crap in it.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost