Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 04:13:11PM -0500, Graham Todd wrote: I doubt this simpler approach would be ITIL compliant ;) but since that is not a goal and the bulk of anything to do with licenses involves lawyers anyway, the ports/pkg system should probably try to do as little as possible regarding claims and interpretation. Surely keeping copies of licenses in an easy to find location doesn't equate to making any legal claim ? NB: I am not a lawyer :) I'm pretty dismayed by the ignore it and it'll go away attitude toward licensing in much of the open source world. How exactly do people think that a willful ignorance defense would in any way protect the FreeBSD project from copyright/license claims where an attempt at due diligence (that is, finding license information with the project files and making note of it in the port Makefile) to the reasonable best of our ability would somehow make the project liable? That doesn't make any sense, and unless there are some lawyers who can cite caselaw to the contrary I think the safest bet is probably an attempt to be transparent and informative, with a disclaimer attached. Of course, I'm not a lawyer either, and this is not intended as legal advice. It's just an expression of frustration at the way everybody seems to think intentionally ignoring licensing will somehow make copyright and license claims invalid. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
Hi, On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 12:13 AM, Doug Barton do...@freebsd.org wrote: On 01/17/2012 14:35, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote: Anything can go wrong, but it is (IMO) quite easy to state the intention of the FreeBSD Project in this case. You're making the very common mistake of assuming that the law has anything to do with reality. It doesn't. The fact that we're making claims about legal issues opens the project up to a wide array of hairy liability problems. It doesn't matter how baseless the lawsuit is, sometimes just filing the suit creates enough damage to kill the thing sued. No, I'm aware that in some parts of the world, law practice is far away from the intention of the law. Luckily, it isn't that bad all over the world, not yet anyway. However, I think that anyone who tries to _do_ something should have the courage / balls / whatever to stand up and try to make the best he or she can, with the means available. Otherwise, we could all just go and hide under a stone, and nothing would be done. Now, can we get back to our regular schedule, please? -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
Nikola Lečić wrote: Anyway, it wasn't clear from the bsd.licenses.mk that we should use 'multi' in situations of 'any later version'. This means that all licensing info of eg. GPL2+ ports must be updated when GPL4 appears... No, we should not use this. Not just because of the potential of having to check and correct every port when GPLv4 appears. In my book, licenced under GPLv2 or GPLv3 is something fundamentally different from licenced under GPLv2 or any later version. The licence framework should be able to make this distinction. Another issue is that the licence infrastructure seems to be making statements about the licence of an application, while the committers only tend to look at individual source packages. What would be the licence of an application whose source is published under BSD licence, but that is linked with both GPv3 and OpenSSL-libraries? I tend to agree with Doug and others that it is probably better to scrap the entire idea. Making assertions about licences and what is accepted is a hairy field, best left to experts. Regards, Johan pgpqnD8hLmBzH.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On 01/18/2012 04:34, Johan van Selst wrote: Nikola Lečić wrote: Anyway, it wasn't clear from the bsd.licenses.mk that we should use 'multi' in situations of 'any later version'. This means that all licensing info of eg. GPL2+ ports must be updated when GPL4 appears... No, we should not use this. Not just because of the potential of having to check and correct every port when GPLv4 appears. In my book, licenced under GPLv2 or GPLv3 is something fundamentally different from licenced under GPLv2 or any later version. The licence framework should be able to make this distinction. Another issue is that the licence infrastructure seems to be making statements about the licence of an application, while the committers only tend to look at individual source packages. What would be the licence of an application whose source is published under BSD licence, but that is linked with both GPv3 and OpenSSL-libraries? I tend to agree with Doug and others that it is probably better to scrap the entire idea. Making assertions about licences and what is accepted is a hairy field, best left to experts. I hope this effort is not completely abandoned since it does seem to offer an easy way to get a general sense of the license status of a system, jail or vm. What about a more explicitly passive approach that does not make assertions about an application's overall license (c.f. linking issues) or the user's acceptance but just makes such license files as do exist easier to find? If such a simple license tracking feature is useful (even if not suitable for management, compliance, budgeting, license acceptance and the like) then something that would grab the locations of license documents in a port's source files and copies the relevant files into a default license location /usr/local/share/licenses/port/ would be enough. Would this ports knob feature (LICENSE_=) disappear if the project were scrapped? I doubt this simpler approach would be ITIL compliant ;) but since that is not a goal and the bulk of anything to do with licenses involves lawyers anyway, the ports/pkg system should probably try to do as little as possible regarding claims and interpretation. Surely keeping copies of licenses in an easy to find location doesn't equate to making any legal claim ? NB: I am not a lawyer :) cheers, ps: ls -1 /usr/local/share/licenses/*/LICENSE | wc -l 221 ls -1 /usr/local/share/licenses/*/* | grep -E MIT|BSD |wc -l 86 ls -1 /usr/local/share/licenses/*/* | grep -E LGPL*|GPL* |wc -l 116 Of course, the above system has 1200 ports installed so there's a ways to go before one could say tracking was happening :) ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
Eitan Adler wrote: 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of target timeline? Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that chapter is written... ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On 01/17/2012 03:56, Vitaly Magerya wrote: Eitan Adler wrote: 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of target timeline? Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that chapter is written... Personally I think we should scrap the whole thing. It is an interesting idea, but the implementation has never fleshed out. It's also completely unclear what any of it means from an actual legal standpoint, and personally I'm not convinced that we aren't making things worse for the project by doing this. Doug -- It's always a long day; 86400 doesn't fit into a short. Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS. Yours for the right price. :) http://SupersetSolutions.com/ ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:38:08AM -0800, Doug Barton wrote: On 01/17/2012 03:56, Vitaly Magerya wrote: Eitan Adler wrote: 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of target timeline? Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that chapter is written... Personally I think we should scrap the whole thing. It is an interesting idea, but the implementation has never fleshed out. It's also completely unclear what any of it means from an actual legal standpoint, and personally I'm not convinced that we aren't making things worse for the project by doing this. How? I don't see the problem that makes things worse, I guess. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On 17 Jan 2012 18:43, Chad Perrin c...@apotheon.net wrote: On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:38:08AM -0800, Doug Barton wrote: On 01/17/2012 03:56, Vitaly Magerya wrote: Eitan Adler wrote: 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of target timeline? Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that chapter is written... Personally I think we should scrap the whole thing. It is an interesting idea, but the implementation has never fleshed out. It's also completely unclear what any of it means from an actual legal standpoint, and personally I'm not convinced that we aren't making things worse for the project by doing this. How? I don't see the problem that makes things worse, I guess. Well... the author and maintainer of the code isn't around any more. Chris ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Chad Perrin wrote: On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:38:08AM -0800, Doug Barton wrote: On 01/17/2012 03:56, Vitaly Magerya wrote: Eitan Adler wrote: 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of target timeline? Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that chapter is written... Personally I think we should scrap the whole thing. It is an interesting idea, but the implementation has never fleshed out. It's also completely unclear what any of it means from an actual legal standpoint, and personally I'm not convinced that we aren't making things worse for the project by doing this. How? I don't see the problem that makes things worse, I guess. In my not-a-lawyer view, I wonder if it puts some responsibility for accurately representing a license on FreeBSD and the ports system. We used this software because the FreeBSD ports system said the license was compatible for our use. Now it turns out otherwise, and we have millions in damages... There's the potential for someone to intentionally put the wrong license in a port to create such a situation. And to protect against that, will committers have to verify the license? ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
Hello, On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 8:46 PM, Warren Block wbl...@wonkity.com wrote: On Tue, 17 Jan 2012, Chad Perrin wrote: On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 10:38:08AM -0800, Doug Barton wrote: On 01/17/2012 03:56, Vitaly Magerya wrote: Eitan Adler wrote: 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes Is someone actually working on it? If so, and is there some sort of target timeline? Back in 2010 when the framework was introduced, my general impression was that maintainers where advised to wait with the adoption until that chapter is written... Personally I think we should scrap the whole thing. It is an interesting idea, but the implementation has never fleshed out. It's also completely unclear what any of it means from an actual legal standpoint, and personally I'm not convinced that we aren't making things worse for the project by doing this. How? I don't see the problem that makes things worse, I guess. In my not-a-lawyer view, I wonder if it puts some responsibility for accurately representing a license on FreeBSD and the ports system. We used this software because the FreeBSD ports system said the license was compatible for our use. Now it turns out otherwise, and we have millions in damages... There's the potential for someone to intentionally put the wrong license in a port to create such a situation. And to protect against that, will committers have to verify the license? But surely this framework is for information purposes only? With standard disclaimers: if you really want to be sure, please check the official source, things might have changed since the port was last updated buyer (or porst user) beware Anything can go wrong, but it is (IMO) quite easy to state the intention of the FreeBSD Project in this case. But that requires that someone writes the chapter about this in the Porters Handbook... -- Regards, Torfinn Ingolfsen ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On 01/17/2012 14:35, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:
Anything can go wrong, but it is (IMO) quite easy to state the intention of
the FreeBSD Project in this case.
You're making the very common mistake of assuming that the law has
anything to do with reality. It doesn't. The fact that we're making
claims about legal issues opens the project up to a wide array of hairy
liability problems. It doesn't matter how baseless the lawsuit is,
sometimes just filing the suit creates enough damage to kill the thing
sued.
For example:
@${ECHO_MSG} === License ${_LICENSE} accepted by the user
*shudder*
Doug
--
It's always a long day; 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
Yours for the right price. :) http://SupersetSolutions.com/
___
freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports
To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
Hello, I'm about to add licensing info to all my 25 ports. I hoped that a chapter dedicated to licensing issues would appear in the Porters Handbook, but since this hasn't happened so far, I decided to try without it. Here are my questions; sorry if some of them are already answered in the past. 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) 2) Should I mark the ports that explicitly state X11 with MIT? 3) Intentionally no difference between 2- and 3-clause BSD? 4) How should I state eg. LGPL21 or any later version or GPL2 only i.e. no later version? 5) What if licensing info differs for entire source file and actually installed files? In textproc/kmfl-sil-ezra source file, the font is licensed OFL and the keyboard layout X11; the port installs only keyboard layout. Should I state just MIT in the Makefile? 6) I need three new items added to the licenses database because they should be considered as 'known' licenses and thus belonging to the 'Case 1' in bsd.licenses.mk. There are: Common Public License, SIL Open Font License and Public Domain [non-license]. I'd gladly submit a PR, but I'd appreciate if someone could check this first, especially _LICENSE_GROUPS_* including COPYFREE status. 6a) CPL: _LICENSE_NAME_CPL= Common Public License _LICENSE_GROUPS_CPL=FSF http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Public_License http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CommonPublicLicense10 As for this license, the software in question (textproc/teckit) is licensed GLPLv2.1+ or CPLv0.5+. However, the CPL version approved on gnu.org, used in NetBSD... is 1.0. Should we make any difference between CPL versions because of this? Or just to use LICENSE_TEXT? (Btw, the Wikipedia article on CPL states that this license is OSI-approved, but I can't find it here: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category.) 6b) OFL: _LICENSE_NAME_OFL= SIL Open Font License _LICENSE_GROUPS_OFL=FSF OSI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIL_Open_Font_License http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#SILOFL http://www.opensource.org/licenses/OFL-1.1 6c) PD[?]: _LICENSE_NAME_PD= Public Domain _LICENSE_GROUPS_PD= FSF GPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#PublicDomain http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/licenses/public-domain?only_with_tag=MAIN Many thanks in advance, -- Nikola Lečić = Никола Лечић fingerprint : FEF3 66AF C90E EDC3 D878 7CDC 956D F4AB A377 1C9B pgpxqZlAu9o2O.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
2012/1/16 Nikola Lečić nikola.le...@anthesphoria.net: Hello, I'm about to add licensing info to all my 25 ports. I hoped that a chapter dedicated to licensing issues would appear in the Porters Handbook, but since this hasn't happened so far, I decided to try without it. Here are my questions; sorry if some of them are already answered in the past. 1) Will licensing section ever appear in the Porters Handbook? :-) Yes 2) Should I mark the ports that explicitly state X11 with MIT? Yes, or you may break the build. Not that I've ever done that of course ;) 3) Intentionally no difference between 2- and 3-clause BSD? I hope not. We should probably have a BSD2, BSD3, and BSD4 license. For now mark it with a comment (or offer a patch to the db file too) 4) How should I state eg. LGPL21 or any later version or GPL2 only i.e. no later version? 5) What if licensing info differs for entire source file and actually installed files? In textproc/kmfl-sil-ezra source file, the font is licensed OFL and the keyboard layout X11; the port installs only keyboard layout. Should I state just MIT in the Makefile? LICENSE_COMB=multi I think 6) I need three new items added to the licenses database because they should be considered as 'known' licenses and thus belonging to the 'Case 1' in bsd.licenses.mk. There are: Common Public License, SIL Open Font License and Public Domain [non-license]. I'd gladly submit a PR, but I'd appreciate if someone could check this first, especially _LICENSE_GROUPS_* including COPYFREE status. Please submit this as a patch in a PR and email me. I'll make sure they get added. Common Public License is not copyfree. SIL Open Font License is not copyfree. Putting something in the Public Domain doesn't work in any meaningful sense and is not a license. I am not a lawyer and I am not giving legal advice. -- Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 08:14:57PM -0500 in CAF6rxg=n1ocjoyfg40k8fkuzbtms8s_r8v7vclocapzfmwq...@mail.gmail.com Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: 2012/1/16 Nikola Lečić nikola.le...@anthesphoria.net: [...] 3) Intentionally no difference between 2- and 3-clause BSD? I hope not. We should probably have a BSD2, BSD3, and BSD4 license. For now mark it with a comment (or offer a patch to the db file too) Ok. What should happen with existing BSD in that case? 4) How should I state eg. LGPL21 or any later version or GPL2 only i.e. no later version? 5) What if licensing info differs for entire source file and actually installed files? In textproc/kmfl-sil-ezra source file, the font is licensed OFL and the keyboard layout X11; the port installs only keyboard layout. Should I state just MIT in the Makefile? LICENSE_COMB=multi I think I see, but does 'multi' applies to distfile which is just downloaded and unzipped or to installed files (and eo ipso to the FreeBSD package)? Anyway, it wasn't clear from the bsd.licenses.mk that we should use 'multi' in situations of 'any later version'. This means that all licensing info of eg. GPL2+ ports must be updated when GPL4 appears... 6) I need three new items added to the licenses database because they should be considered as 'known' licenses and thus belonging to the 'Case 1' in bsd.licenses.mk. There are: Common Public License, SIL Open Font License and Public Domain [non-license]. I'd gladly submit a PR, but I'd appreciate if someone could check this first, especially _LICENSE_GROUPS_* including COPYFREE status. Please submit this as a patch in a PR and email me. I'll make sure they get added. Will do. Common Public License is not copyfree. SIL Open Font License is not copyfree. Ok, thanks. Putting something in the Public Domain doesn't work in any meaningful sense and is not a license. converters/base64 is public domain (see COPYING from its distfile). Do you mean that Public Domain shouldn't be added to the licenses database? NetBSD has it. Thanks, -- Nikola Lečić = Никола Лечић fingerprint : FEF3 66AF C90E EDC3 D878 7CDC 956D F4AB A377 1C9B pgpZeNEDgraCv.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
2012/1/16 Nikola Lečić nikola.le...@anthesphoria.net: On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 08:14:57PM -0500 in CAF6rxg=n1ocjoyfg40k8fkuzbtms8s_r8v7vclocapzfmwq...@mail.gmail.com Eitan Adler li...@eitanadler.com wrote: 2012/1/16 Nikola Lečić nikola.le...@anthesphoria.net: [...] 3) Intentionally no difference between 2- and 3-clause BSD? I hope not. We should probably have a BSD2, BSD3, and BSD4 license. For now mark it with a comment (or offer a patch to the db file too) Ok. What should happen with existing BSD in that case? Leave it (cause some ports/configurations might break) but deprecate it. Note that I am not on portmgr ;) I see, but does 'multi' applies to distfile which is just downloaded and unzipped or to installed files (and eo ipso to the FreeBSD package)? Anyway, it wasn't clear from the bsd.licenses.mk that we should use 'multi' in situations of 'any later version'. This means that all licensing info of eg. GPL2+ ports must be updated when GPL4 appears... I am not certain about this. Putting something in the Public Domain doesn't work in any meaningful sense and is not a license. converters/base64 is public domain (see COPYING from its distfile). Do you mean that Public Domain shouldn't be added to the licenses database? NetBSD has it. This list is the wrong location to discuss this issue so any followup should happen off-list. -- Eitan Adler ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Adding licensing info to my ports: some questions
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 05:40:35AM +0300, Nikola Lečić wrote: On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 08:14:57PM -0500 Eitan Adler [email address elided] wrote: 2012/1/16 Nikola Lečić nikola.le...@anthesphoria.net: 6) I need three new items added to the licenses database because they should be considered as 'known' licenses and thus belonging to the 'Case 1' in bsd.licenses.mk. There are: Common Public License, SIL Open Font License and Public Domain [non-license]. I'd gladly submit a PR, but I'd appreciate if someone could check this first, especially _LICENSE_GROUPS_* including COPYFREE status. Please submit this as a patch in a PR and email me. I'll make sure they get added. Will do. Common Public License is not copyfree. SIL Open Font License is not copyfree. Ok, thanks. There are lists of licenses certified as complying with the Copyfree Standard Definition and licenses explicitly rejected at the Copyfree Initiative website: http://copyfree.org/licenses http://copyfree.org/rejected I hope this helps in the future. There are contact links on the site you can use to send messages if you have other licenses than listed there you want to ask about. It might be worthwhile to check the page for the Copyfree Standard Definition when wondering about a given license, if it is not on one of those lists, though: http://copyfree.org/standard Putting something in the Public Domain doesn't work in any meaningful sense and is not a license. converters/base64 is public domain (see COPYING from its distfile). Do you mean that Public Domain shouldn't be added to the licenses database? NetBSD has it. It seems like it would be useful to have a public domain category of some kind, from where I'm sitting, with the understanding that it may not mean anything useful depending on jurisdiction. Beyond that, I probably shouldn't say anything about it on this list. The applicability of plain ol' public domain dedications can be a contentious topic. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] ___ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
