On Wed, 1 Nov 2000 10:18:21 -0600 (CST), Frederick Bruckman wrote:

>  On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Alistair Crooks wrote:
>  
>  > I'd prefer to have each licence in a *sigh* pkgsrc/licenses directory.
(the
>  > "sigh" is for the spelling). Then when a new licence is added, its name
goes
>  > into the mk.conf.example file, and a copy of the licence would be added
to
>  > pkgsrc/licenses/<licence>. It would also be most handy to add the GPL
(1 and
>  > 2) and the LGPL licences there, as well as the BSD licence.
>  
>  How many unique licenses do you suppose there are? Consider that if
>  the author chooses to paraphrase the GPL for his own purposes, that's
>  a unique license. 50? 100? 500?
>  
>  Who's asking for this, anyway? "pkgsrc" needs to know _something_
>  about the license -- at least enough to know whether it's OK to
>  mirror the source, but beyond that, why can't the user just unpack the
>  distribution and read the license himself?
>  
>  -- 
>  
>  Frederick
>  

You assume that everyone is connected to the Internet at all times.

Sometimes distfiles run into the tens of megabytes - are you seriously
telling me I should download all of that (and some people in the developing
countries of Western Europe, like UK and Germany, still have to pay for
that) just to find that a licence is too onerous for me to use?

I thought we all agreed that having an idea up-front of the terms of the
licence was a good thing?

As to the number of licences - that should be exactly the same as the number
that we have in ACCEPTABLE_LICENCES in mk.conf.example, which is creeping
up, but was less than 10 last time I looked. I'd also like GPL and BSD
licences in there for completeness, nothing else.

Regards,
Al

--
Alistair Crooks (agc@pkgsrc.org)





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