On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

: I think my (admittedly very abstract) proposal is much more concise
: w.r.t. the handling of copyright, crypto/export, and patent issues.

Could you forward me a new copy again so that I might reread it?  Maybe I
missed something.

My concept is "assume the most restrictive environment, and allow the user
to enable bits from there".  That is, assume a commercial, for-profit
environment where crypto is completely banned and ... blah blah blah.
This reduces the number of questionable cases when building "by hand" with
defaults to zero, and the pkgsrc documentation would (should) explain what
each license option does.

: W.R.T. requiring or not requiring source distribution, I forgot to
: mention the following as well:  from the perspective of pkgsrc the
: issues about source distribution are relatively minor,

Not necessarily.  Source distribution is explicitly disallowed for some
packages (where binaries are in fact allowed -- see JDK and xv), very touchy
for crypto, and under particular license conditions for GPL.  The fact that
we haven't handled source distribution on a consistent basis is ...
disturbing.

: The only real issue that might arise is the opposite one -- i.e. where
: source is explicitly *not* redistributable (and may not even be freely
: available) even though binaries can be freely (re)distributed.

Which illustrates one of my points above.  `So why did you complain?'

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)