Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 16:37:17 +0000 (UTC) From: naddy@mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber) To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: License issues (e.g. mod_throttle, mod_watch) Message-ID: <baqrft$1uud$1@kemoauc.mips.inka.de>
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It is my impression that the FreeBSD porters as a collective handle license issues in ports more lax than, say, their OpenBSD counterparts. I'm not sure whether this is intentional or due to negligence. What is our policy here? Do we want to strictly follow the authors' licenses or is everything that is downloadable fair game? This is not a rhetoric question. Since I know some of you will demand specifics, here are the latest two examples that made me think about the issue. www/mod_throttle. This comes with a license so short I can quote it in full: This source distribution is made freely available and there is no charge for its use, provided you retain this notice, disclaimers, author's copyright, and credits. Note that there is no mention of redistribution. That means redistribution in any form is prohibited. Accordingly, this port should be marked RESTRICTED. www/mod_watch, by the same author. This has a more specific license, see http://www.snert.com/Software/mod_watch/ Non-commercial redistribution of binaries is not permitted without prior written consent. That means NO_PACKAGE. If the FreeBSD project happens to have such permission and we don't care about transitivity (do we?), then the limits on commercial redistribution should still imply NO_CDROM. I suspect a full-fledged license audit of the ports tree would turn up a sizable number of problematic cases. Now, before I go out and prod maintainers about individual cases I run into, I would like to have some sort of consensus opinion or portmgr statement that clarifies our stance on this. -- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de
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