I think we're in need of guidelines regarding adding new licenses (and I would agree that this has not been adequately clear to date). My proposal follows. The purpose of LICENSE tagging is to avoid accidentally building software with objectionable licenses. There is an admitted bias towards Open Source/Free software, and an admitted bias towards broadly accepted licenses and against boutique licenses. There is no intent to have a full machine-readable taxonomy of all possible licenses. There is a cost to having many licenses in pkgsrc, and licenses should be added only in support of the purpose of LICENSE tagging. It is important that software that is non-Free and non-Open-Source be tagged so that it does not build by default. It's more important that software which is actually Free or Open Source build without hassle than that the nuances of Free/Open Source licenses be tagged accurately. If a package has an OR of multiple licenses, and one of the licenses is approved as open/free, then tag with that license, and leave a comment about the other one. Only licenses that will actually be used in LICENSE= statements should be added. Licenses that are approved by OSI/FSF can be added to licenses/ and to the default in license.mk without discussion, but take care that the same license with a slightly different name is not already present. When in doubt ask on tech-pkg@. Licenses that are clearly non-free and non-open (not just not approved, but that would not be approved) can be added to licenses/ without discussion, with the same caveat about care to avoid duplication. In the case of licenses that appear intended to be free/open but are not approved, some effort to contact upstream and get them to either modify the license or submit it for approval should be made. Proposals to add licenses in this middle group should be sent to tech-pkg@ for discussion before adding them. When AND conditions are implemented, it is appropriate to add all licenses listed in an AND condition. When OR conditions are implemented, it is appropriate to add licenses in OR conditions when there is a demonstrated need to use the less common license. Boutique and fringe licenses as alternatives to Free licenses should only be added when there are actual people who have stated in public that the free license is objectionable but the boutique license is not objectionable. Anything more complicated than above should be discussed on tech-pkg@ before being added. An alternative proposal is that we should decide not to tag Free/Open Source software, reverting to just #LICENSE= comments. So far tagging of free software has seemed to cost more than the benefits.
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