On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 12:54:19PM +0100, Landry Breuil wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:17:02AM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote:
> > On 2011/03/15 20:42, Brynet wrote:
> > > http://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#NOCANADIANS
> > >
> > > Does not want me.
> > > Do. Not. Want.
> >
> > Considering this, I think either PERMIT_*_CDROM should be disabled
> > and a warning added to MESSAGE, or not import it at all..what do other
> > porters think?
>
> I'd consider that not-so-free-at-all... i understand the reasoning, but
> this is a bit against opensource imo. I'm not against the import, but i
> think PERMIT_* should be set to no. cperciva@ is the maintainer for the
> FreeBSD port, and he set it to "RESTRICTED: license restricts
> redistribution of source and binaries".
I asked Colin privately about the RESTRICTED marker, and he replied with
(paraphrased) "the license is nonstandard, and I didn't want to bother
the release manager". I think the license is fairly clear, but I'd be
willing to get (public) clarification of any issues you have.
And then there's the issue of tarsnap.com not allowing Canadians to
register...
The license of the port itself does not cause any problems - Canadians
are *clearly* allowed to build and mirror tarsnap. And nobody is going
to accidentally violate tarsnap.com's license (you have to tick "I am
not a citizen or resident of Canada." to create an account).
I do agree that tarsnap.com should accept Canadians. However, *there is
no actual legal threat to the project or anyone else*. You could refuse
to import tarsnap or set PERMIT_*=no, but that would be an act of
protest (against a legal document that does not actually govern the
tarsnap code), *not* a legal necessity.
One *could* make an argument that OpenBSD should protest tarsnap.com's
discriminatory terms of service. But I haven't seen it yet, and the
no-Canadians policy is based purely on a practical argument (tarsnap.com
is just one guy, and sales tax is complicated). And note that we have
net/p5-Net-Amazon (state-hopping sales tax-evasion shenanigans),
math/maple (commercial software) and lots of other non-FOSS stuff in our
ports tree.
Ultimately, you guys are the developers. I'll accept being overridden.
But I don't agree that we *have* to make installing tarsnap any more
complicated than "pkg_add tarsnap".
Joachim
