On 08/10/2012, Gerd Stolpmann <i...@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote: > Am 08.10.2012 20:23:49 schrieb(en) Anil Madhavapeddy: >> On 8 Oct 2012, at 11:14, Thomas Gazagnaire >> <thomas.gazagna...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > Regarding the license for GODI description files: most of the >> description files that packagers create in GODI are actually >> copied/pasted from author's website, so I'm not sure how you'll be >> able to track this if you don't have a *very* permissive licensing >> scheme. >> >> For this reason alone, anything other than a public domain license >> seems very questionable. Are you really sure that all the >> contributors to GODI have the rights to relicense it under a Creative >> Commons license? > > If they don't have the right to relicense, they also don't have the > right to make it public domain.
Actually another big issue is that the ability to place something under Public Domain is anglo-saxon law. This is NOT doable for most people. This might be the reason for licenses such as the WTFPL which probably achieve something similar but at least it can be done. I'd also like to point out that such texts, while short, are not always trivial and another writer would probably have written something else. That last aspect is pretty much how you determine whether something can be copyrighted or not. I'm mentionning that for translations mostly but it seems to be a common conception (especially for native english speakers) that texts do not deserve their own licensing. > As mentioned in the other email, most GODI packagers are actually the > original authors or closely connected, so I don't see a big problem. > For questionable packages we can find alternate formulations. We should > only agree on something. > >> On the other hand, public domain is at least relatively simple. I >> took a look at the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports trees to get some >> inspiration, and OpenBSD appears to be public domain (or, at least, >> bsd.port.mk is), and FreeBSD is 2-clause BSD licensed (but there are >> references to "source code" there which may not apply to textual >> description files). Both of these repositories have a significant >> number of licenses cut&pasted from websites in their DESCR files. >> >> Given that the goal of all these packaging systems is to make it easy >> for other people to get on with using OCaml, I would encourage >> dropping on the side of simplicity and making the description files >> public domain. > > Well, as you know, the description files are the only trackable part of > the package metadata - which, in total, is a lot of work to create and > maintain. We have a lot of problems finding enough people to do it, and > I think we should give some credit back to those who spend their time > for this work. I believe asking for PD (or WTFPL, or any specific license) would actually limit the number of contributions. Submitting a package for godi only requires that the license be compatible with whatever godi requires. If I want to make a package under a free license but that only godi can use, then fine. Remember that GPLv2 is incompatible with Apache and GPLv3 but that the GPLv3 is compatible with the Apache License. Such issues happen. I'm not in favor of such limitations between packaging systems but they most probably already exist. I'd much rather explain to people how their licensing choice impact people and tools rather than requiring a specific license. CC licenses are simple and probably simpler than BSD licenses actually. They're also meant for not-code (which can easily be seen by the fact they suck for code). Wikipedia is currently under some CC variant and I don't think that's causing any issue. -- Adrien Nader _______________________________________________ Godi-list mailing list Godi-list@ocaml-programming.de https://godirepo.camlcity.org/mailman/listinfo/godi-list
