trunk/doc-new/guide/xml/portfiledev.xml: license

[Rainer Müller]

On 2012-09-12 19:18, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
> Perhaps it's time to uncomment the license list item in the MP Guide "Section 4.2. Creating a Portfile"?
> https://trac.macports.org/changeset/55459
> 
> I don't think I understand the MP Portfile license policy well enough to do it myself.
> 
> Does anyone want to take this on or is the MP license policy documented in source or elsewhere in the trac wiki?

I think the only kind of documentation we have on this topic is in the
script used by the build bot to determine whether a specific port may be
redistributed or not:

https://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/base/portmgr/jobs/port_binary_distributable.tcl#L24

I don't think it makes sense to list each and every license we use on
all the ports. A short list of the most common used licenses as examples
should help more.

In case you are interested, here is the current top 10:

$ port -q info --index --license all |grep -v ^-- |sort |uniq -c |sort
-rn |head
5793 unknown
2238 Artistic-1 GPL
1110 BSD
 877 Artistic GPL
 775 MIT
 611 GPL-2+
 468 GPL-2
 225 LGPL
 222 LGPL-2.1+
 219 Apache-2

However, due to the large amount of perl ports, this is not as helpful
as I imagined...

I think we should include BSD/MIT, GPL, LGPL and especially explain the
syntax to specify the version and the '+'-extension for "or any later
version" as used in the GPL/LGPL.

Rainer