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

[Joshua Root]

On 2012-9-19 00:45 , Rainer Müller wrote:
> 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

Most of these should actually specify the version of the Artistic
license (the vast majority are Artistic-1 just like perl 5).

>  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.

The docs could just link to <http://spdx.org/licenses/> and then explain
how our conventions differ from theirs in a few cases, like only
differentiating BSD licenses based on presence of the advertising clause
rather than 6 different categories.

- Josh