Re: no explicit license on upstream
On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 03:39:51PM +0100, Gabriele Giacone wrote:
> My question is about licenses: dependencies have been licensed well
> otherwise they would not be in Debian but ispy directory and ispy
> website resources don't explicitly refer to a specific license.
> Should upstream create a LICENSE file? Or a manifest/disclaimer on
> download page would be better? Or 1 and 2?
Unfortunately without any sort of license file or some sort of note or
anything at all then the program is unlicensed. A license generally
means something permitting you to do something you normally cannot. So
no license means no permission.
Now that's probably not the intention of the writers of the software but
that is unfortunately the outcome of the program as it stands.
The world is filled with programs that are not-quite-rightly licensed.
One of the nice things with Debian is we try to fix it, when possible.
This isn't changing the minds of the upstream developers, but just
getting them to be a bit more explicit about what they were thinking.
My suggestion is if they want to choose a license, any license, then use
one that most other software like it uses, and failing that use GPL. I
personally started using that for my software in 1994 and don't regret
it. However, if they have a preference for it, BSD is pretty good too.
- Craig
--
Craig Small GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE 95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
http://www.enc.com.au/ csmall at : enc.com.au
http://www.debian.org/ Debian GNU/Linux, software should be Free
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