On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 5:16 PM, David Golden <xda...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:21 AM, Zefram <zef...@fysh.org> wrote: >>>17.02) Make the license field an arrayref rather than a scalar. >>> >> Could make the field a string expression, with the defined keywords as >> atomic expressions, "|" and "&" operators for license combination, and >> parens for precedence. A distro with some files Perl-licensed and some >> pure-GPLed could then be expressed as "gpl & perl". "perl" itself is >> defined as "gpl | artistic". > > -1 > > License can never really be determined without actually reading the > source. I don't want to see us create a mini-language to describe > license combinations.
Agree with this. > As I said in the original comments -- I don't think anyone actually > uses the "license" field in META today. Case examples anyone? Can we License field in META can be used for basic search of conflicts and to get basic idea on licensing. I think it's better to make this field very simple and clear. Proposal: License field MUST be specified. Values are not restricted. Purpose of this field is to bring attention of authors to licensing. Multiple values CAN be specified, but interpretation MAY be different. Users of the software SHOULD NOT use this value to make final decision about licensing. Any software that uses this field for any sort of automation MUST warn users that results can not be 100% trusted. Software that generates META files MUST NOT set this field to any default value, but MAY use sources writen by author to guess. > adopt a YAGNI principle on license? My main goal here is to bring author's attention to licensing at early stages, so I agree on YAGNI and only vote for things I find helpful using previouse experience. I recall case when pretty important changes was rejected as license of the module was not known at the moment to the current maintainer and original author was not repsonding. The situation was on hook until I proved that code is based on example from RFC. That code has been changed, there was enough sense in changes to make the change, but I believe in some cases it would be much harder to find resolution without some license information. Considering goals and prev discussion, here is my summary: 1) I vote for mandatory value and that's the only thing I vote for. 2) URLs can not be trusted, I believe that version X of a software released under license L1 stays under terms of this license even if content of the page has been changed. Probably license itself can describe this. 3) value is free. If it says "foo bar" then it means you use it at your own risk. 4) don't care much if it's array or just a string. People showed that interpretation of multiple values can be different. Array can be more helpful to separate values, but doesn't reveal any meaning. 5) it can be hash with description => url pairs. > -- David -- Best regards, Ruslan.
