On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 08:27:32AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> joerg@britannica.bec.de writes:
> 
> There are lots of packages (vmware, and something in security the name
> I now forget) where you can download a binary distfile and make a
> package, and only use it with a license.

Which is not a problem at all, since we don't run those programs.

> > The situatiob we have now is:
> > (a) bulk builds are uploaded incompletely, since any package using motif
> > (and the default openmotif) has a restricted dependency.
> > (b) the restriction of redistribution at the very least is platform
> > specific.
> 
> Are you saying that bulk builds skip anything with LICENSE=, even if
> NO_BIN_ON_FTP is unset?

lintpkgsrc -R run on my partial local set lists openmotif, so
mk/bulk/upload would skip it and everything which depends on it.

> >> As for using openmotif for personal use on Interix, the license text
> >> doesn't permit it.
> >
> > This is something I am not sure about. I'd like to see a clarification
> > from the Open Group exactly because first the license says that you can
> > use it only on Open Source platforms and second that you must ask for
> > permissions to distribute or sublicense it. There's a hole.
> 
> That's a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright law, and I'm sorry
> for muddying the water above.  Two points:
> 
> 1) "use" is not a right reserved to copyright holders; copyright is
>    about the creative expression of ideas, and grants authors
>    certain exclusive rights.
> 
> 2) If the holder doesn't grant a right and that right is one of the
>    reserved rights (the right to copy and make derived works are most
>    important here), and the copying doesn't fall under fair use, one
>    can't do it.  There's no (legal) need for the copyright holder to
>    explicitly prohibit it.
> 
> This gets murky, because it isn't clear if compiling a program on
> one's own machine after the open group makes a copy by responding to
> the download request is the creation of a derivative work protected by
> copyright law, fair use, or something else (see DJB's software law
> comments).  It also isn't clear who is making a copy when one
> downloads a file from an FTP server.

Exactly those are the reasons why I'd like to get a clarification. If
the answer is "personal use is OK", we can end this debatte at this
point.

> The license text at
> 
>   http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/
> 
> says that the license is solely about distribution and sublicensing.
> That seems to imply that the open group subscribes to the "use is not
> a right controlled by copyright".  But, the license file in the
> distribution is different.

I know, I found it quite disturbing...

> In any case, it is entirely clear and I believe undisputed that this
> is not an open source license.  Therefore, given our current
> documented guidelines it should have LICENSE set.

*But* LICENSE currently triggers the restricted case of lintpkgsrc,
which makes it inappropiate. I don't even want to discuss whether or not
it is an open source license, since that ends up in a flamewar of its
down.

Joerg