Re: Please be careful when adding license tags

[Jens Rehsack <rehsack%googlemail.com@localhost>]

Greg Troxel wrote:
> When adding LICENSE tags for Free software, please make sure that the
> tag is listed in DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES.  (Hopefully this problem
> would show up when you do the test build prior to committing anyway :-)

Please - let me ask to understand you correctly. Do you want that no
LICENSE=abc is added to a package if that license isn't default acceptable?
Or do you want that abc is added always to DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES?

> Artistic 2.0 is both Open Source and free and Artistic (1) is only Open
> Source (but not declared non-free):
> 
>  http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#ArtisticLicense
>  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-1.0.php
> 
> If the tag isn't in DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES, please (in the case of
> Free-ish software) either add it or instead raise the issue on tech-pkg.
> Having LICENSE set to something not in DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES
> breaks automatic builds and updating.  (Of course, if the software isn't
> free, a broken build is the right answer.)

I'm no license expert and I do not presume which license is acceptable for
someone or not. The author of DBD::Pg (Greg Sabino Mullane) declares the
license under which the module can be distributed - regardless if we accept
it per default or not.

By the way - I do not understand why some licenses (e.g. GPLv2) are
acceptable and others (vim's license) is not. But this is another discussion.

> (This was triggered by running pkg_rolling-replace on a machine that
> runs basically only apache/trac/svn/pgsql, and it errored out:
> 
> ===> Cleaning for p5-DBD-postgresql-2.13.1
> ERROR: This package has set PKG_FAIL_REASON:
> ERROR: p5-DBD-postgresql-2.13.1 has an unacceptable license: artistic-2.0.
> ERROR:     To view the license, enter "/usr/bin/make show-license".
> ERROR:     To indicate acceptance, add this line to /etc/mk.conf:
> ERROR:     ACCEPTABLE_LICENSES+=artistic-2.0
> *** Error code 1
> 
> I ran into this with some other package a few days ago.)

Yes, that was my fault. Correct would be 'artistic OR gnu-gpl-v2' - I'll
correct that (and I check all the other artistic-2.0 commits I made) to
'gnu-gpl-v2 #OR artistic'.

Best regards,
Jens