Is there a license on patches

[Weissmann Markus]

On 08.11.2007, at 17:58, Emmanuel Hainry wrote:

> Dear list,
>
> 		For a port I maintain (namely rubber), there are some patches
> that upstream has not yet included and are provided by the  
> maintainer of
> the port for pkgsrc. They are now in macports repository and I wonder
> which license if any is applied to patches (as Trac.macports.org tells
> people that what they put here is automatically under the Apache or  
> BSD
> License). Is there a way to credit the author of a patch and to  
> cite the
> license they may be under?
>
> 	This problem (but is it a problem?) is, I think, not a rare thing:
> the work of preparing a program to be part of a ports project is very
> similar between pkgsrc, openBSD, freeBSD and macports (maybe gentoo  
> and
> other linux source based packages too) and hence reusing patches from
> others is highly probable.
>

You only get a copyright for a significant creation, so "stealing"  
something like a hello-world program*) won't get you to jail.
I think many patches would not classify as a significant creation, so  
borrowing them from other BSD ports collection, etc. is just fine --  
as is the other way round.

If you want to credit the author of a patch, I would add some lines  
to beginning of the patchfile, mentioning where the patch came from.
If you integrate a significant patch that has a different open source  
license -- perhaps even a more restrictive than the original one --  
you should add a comment to the long_description.

If a significant patch is not under a license that allows it's  
redistribution, you are not allowed to add it to the macports  
repository.

Of course I'm no lawyer and your local law might see things  
different, but I'd expect this to work in most countries. Not to  
forget about the goodwill open source people often have.


-Markus

*) depending on the programming language... ;)

---
Markus W. Weissmann
http://www.mweissmann.de/