Top-posting hoooooooooooooo Ok guys, let's think about this from a simple logistics standpoint. Neither Eric or Nick are qualified to make legal judgments on, well, anything as far as I'm aware of. That means RubyCentral is going to need a full-time lawyer, or more like an army of them, to police the 100,000+ gems that are out there.
Maybe if one of you wants to foot the bill? Remember, in the United States it is *ILLEGAL* to dispense legal advice unless you are a licensed lawyer. -Erik On Oct 14, 2011, at 12:16 PM, Marcus Rueckert wrote: > On 2011-10-13 12:58:29 -0700, Eric Hodel wrote: >> On Oct 12, 2011, at 6:54 AM, Pavol Rusnak wrote: >>> I'd like to propose making license/licenses field mandatory. While doing >>> rubygem packages for Linux distributions we have to deal with licenses a >>> lot and currently not having a license field in gemspec is the only >>> thing stopping us from doing automated packaging. One has to unpack the >>> gem, search for the license text and change the field by hand. If these >>> fields were mandatory (i.e. one or the other), it would make the whole >>> process much easier. In my opinion the license is very important aspect >>> of the gem similarly important as its name and I think also non-Linux >>> parts of Ruby ecosystem would benefit from that change. What do you think? >> >> >> The first goal of RubyGems is to provide useful tools for Rubyists to >> share libraries. The needs of repackagers comes second. >> >> I'm fine with a warning at gem build time if the license is not set. >> >> I don't want to make it suddenly mandatory as that disrupts a gem >> author's workflow. In order for this to be successful for gem >> packagers, Rubyists need to agree it is a good thing. Some authors >> will avoid upgrading RubyGems if mandatory requirements are added too >> quickly. Perhaps in the future it can be made mandatory if gem >> authors agree it is a good thing, but not for the present. >> >> As a repackager, if the license field is not set you should submit a >> patch to the gem author to set it for them. > > This is really not just about repackager. > > It also affects users, like others have pointed out. Just to name the > recent example of the BSD4 clause fun with the bcrypt-ruby dependency > for rails 3.1. :) > > rubygems would be an ideal please to make gem packager aware of that a > license is needed. you dont want to know how often i have to open bugs > with gems "what is the license of your code"? because there is neither a > license header in the source files, or a license/copyright file or at > least a mention of the license in the readme. (not even in their SCM) > > And proposing to use the license tag standard recently pushed by the big > linux distributions will also make integration work easier. no need to > invent new acronyms, no need for mapping tables between the different > names. the syntax can even handle multiple license in the same package > and knows if the conditions are "and" or "or". > > So i would really like to vouch for making the the check a bit more strict > when a license tag is found in the gem spec, but having it optional with > warning for a few releases. > > darix > > -- > openSUSE - SUSE Linux is my linux > openSUSE is good for you > www.opensuse.org > _______________________________________________ > RubyGems-Developers mailing list > http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems > RubyGems-Developers@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers _______________________________________________ RubyGems-Developers mailing list http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubygems RubyGems-Developers@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rubygems-developers
