Re: Handling licenses

[Leonardo Taccari <leot%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hello Roland,

Roland Illig writes:
> Quoting http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/fixes.html#handling-licenses:
> > The pkgsrc system, as a policy choice, does not label packages
> > which have licenses that are Free or Open Source.
> 
> This seems to contradict the current pkglint behavior, which says that
> “Every package must define its LICENSE”. Since the text from the pkgsrc
> guide is 9 years old, is it still up-to-date?
Indeed this is not true, at least in the last years.
For PKG_DEVELOPERs also mk/license.mk prints out a warning message in
that case.

So yes, I think that part of pkgsrc guide is outdated!

> Also, the pkgsrc guide does not give helpful instructions on determining
> which license a package has. Do we have some tool that I can feed a
> given COPYING file into, and it tells me which of the predefined
> licenses it is? Recognizing the GNU GPL is easy, since it says so, but
> choosing between the various BSD licenses requires reading the whole
> text, as far as I know.
Usually I just grep(1) through pkgsrc/licenses/ but I should admit
that's not always efficient! I do not see new/rare licenses very often
so practically after one is able to distinguish between MIT, ISC, and
the various BSD and GNU licenses probably for the majority of the
packages she/he will be able to just define LICENSE without any further
tool.