Re: Rv: What license for our packaging?
Emmet Hikory a scris:
On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 8:42 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
--- El sáb, 23/8/08, Eddy Petrișor escribió:
I propose that, from now on, we use the BSD license for our
packaging[2].
I prefer we use the same license as upstream, except for non-free
packages, where BSD/MIT would be appropriate.
I'd like to also speak in favour of this choice. This ensures a
reduction in confusion over the licensing of any patches that may be
applied ("When using a patch system, are patches part of packaging"?
(1)). Although the use of a more permissive license may be be
convenient for the purposes of sharing various packaging tricks, the
majoirty of such tricks are likely to fall below the threshold for
which a license must be obtained in most jurisdictions, or be created
Are you willing to gamble on that statement?
I am *sure* I have big chances of messing of things if I consider that if I take a small chunk of
some packaging trick (like I just did with tokyocabinet's refresh-patches mechanism in wormux), I am
not the object of a copyright law in some significant amount of countries in the world.
Note: VPLs = very permissive licenses - e.g.: 2-clause BSD, 3-clause BSD, zlib, MIT, Artistic or
public domain (not a license, per se)
I don't see *any* benefit in using, by default, the same license as upstream in favour of a VPL,
since those upstream license are from the get-go less permissive than the proposed licenses (except
public domain, which isn't a license per se).
by someone closely involved in Debian, so that the overhead of asking
permission for use outside the license is fairly low where the license
under which it is distributed is incompatible with the licensing for
the package in which it might be applied.
BSD and others VPLs are the most compatible licenses out there; you can't get any better than that
(except PD)
In the case where packaging must be differently licensed (e.g.
non-free), I'd personally prefer to see the use of the MIT or ISC
If you find MIT is less confusing, I would agree with it; my main point is to have:
- a permissive license for our packaging
- that license should always be used, by default, except *really* exceptional cases (think adopted
package in which debian/* is licensed already with some other license)
I simply proposed the BSD license because I found that in the package whose code I used.
licenses to the "BSD" license, just to reduce the confusion that may
result from questions of "Which BSD license?", and to avoid the use of
/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD so that copyrights are not arbitrarily
assigned to the Regents of the University of California (which may not
Oh, my, I think we can put those questions to rest if we clearly state the Copyright is of the
people involved and we use the 2-clause license, which, by the way should be present in the
debian/copyright snippet since is not present in /usr/share/common-licenses.
be possible in some jurisdictions without the agreement of the
recipient of such a copyright assignment).
1: This is a rhetorical question asked for the purposes of
demonstrating the described confusion, and is not intended to be
answered (and further, I doubt we can answer it with our collective
level of both legal training and willingness to provide legal advice).
that is somewhat questionable, but I find that question waaaaay beyond the scope of this discussion,
so please, let's stay focused.
--
Regards,
EddyP
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"Imagination is more important than knowledge" A.Einstein
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