Licence unspecified?

[Peter Danecek]

Hi Josh,

Thanks for all these information. Find some replies below.
~petr


On Dec 10, 2013, at 13:36 , Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:

> On 2013-12-10 22:39 , Peter Danecek wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> I am authoring a python port where the license is not specified and I am wondering how to deal with this.
>> 
>> I saw mentioning of `License: unknown` in some examples so I would guess this is the correct keyword to put. 
>> 
>> Is it the default as well? 
>> Should it be than left out (because it is the default)?
> 
> "license unknown" means nobody has set the license for that port yet.
> The license option didn't exist for a long time, so older ports are
> often in this situation. New ports should have a license specified.

I known, that license that were not always specified, and this is where my doubt comes from. However, "license unknown" can be found in various examples in the Guide and if this keyword is not meant to be specified explicitly, this makes little sense.

>> I guess, it makes sense to provide this info explicitly, because it was looked up and no explicit statement from the author(s) on the licence could be found, which is different from the situation where the port author omits this info.
> 
> No license at all is bad because it means that regular copyright
> applies, meaning nobody but the copyright holder is allowed to make
> copies. Among other things this means we're not even allowed to mirror
> the source, which happens automatically unless the port is added to a
> list of exclusions. (End users downloading it directly from a place the
> author has made it available is OK, as making it publicly available
> implies giving the public permission to download.)

Well, I see the problem. To be explicit we are talking about this package: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/uuid/1.30
and I found this: http://zesty.ca/python/uuid.html, looked for READMEs or LICENSE files.

However, the fact that the author publishes it on PyPI let me think the author is willing to share and distribute the code. Does PyPI defining something like a "fallback license", ie. if not specified explicitly license XXX applies? 

> The best course is to contact the author and get a license statement
> from them. If this is impossible and you really need to add the port
> anyway, put "license none" and contact Shree or Bill to get it added to
> the mirror exclusions before you commit.

I will need this as a dependency for another port. Now try to contact the author to get an explicit license statement, but this package is not the most recent, so I am not sure to get a reply.
 

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