> 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 > >
Joachim, My humble opinion is that, this should be disallowed. If you want tarsnap, get it and use it from his website. I can fully understand Colin's reasoning, why, I will do it myself if I were in his place. But.... This is the road where the loosening of standards happens. Then this leads to blobs and NVIDIA like onerous licenses as Henning pointed out some months ago. (for those who don't know, basically NVIDIA says if you use our card & binary driver in FreeBSD and do any commercial activity, NVIDIA wants their cut if you have big pockets, they won't bother if you are small potatoes). If as you point out commercial software is in ports, then it should be removed immediately, no matter how many use it. Maple should be removed if it forbids redistribution. There are alternatives out there like R and Sage. They might be poor alternatives but they are freer than Maple. I sincerely do not mean to sound rude in this message, just factual. Thanks, amit
