Ben Johnson, 2012-12-17 22:39-0500:
opentracker is considered "Beerware", which is a legitimate licensing mechanism (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beerware ).
Yes, but is that license well-known enough so we can consider the simple statement “this software is considered beerware”, with neither a license text nor a link to such a text, as a valid indication that this software is indeed licensed under the terms of that free license?
The author also discusses this very subject (uncertainty regarding opentracker's licensing terms) at http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article11/coding-bittorrent-tracker , and offers the following: "If anyone ever would have asked, I would have provided a special permission to re-distribute opentracker under every brain-fart-licencing scheme is the flavour of the year now. Hand written, if necessary. I'm astonished what the community nowaday demands from programmers to graciously accept the software given away for free. Take it or leave it." So, there we have it; the software is free in every sense of the word.
I would not be that optimistic. The author has indeed made his intention clear: this program is certainly intended to be free. But is it really? That would not be the first license bug we encounter…
Ben, if you achieve to get erdgeist to explicit that license, by either adding the full license text (that is only three lines) or a link to its original text on the Web to te source package, that would be great. I tried that, and failed (I think I only managed to annoy him), but you may have more chance.
-- ,--. : /` ) Tanguy Ortolo <xmpp:tanguy@ortolo.eu> | `-' Debian Developer <irc://irc.oftc.net/Tanguy> \_
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