Licence unspecified?

Peter Danecek Peter.Danecek at bo.ingv.it
Tue Dec 10 05:05:46 PST 2013


Josh, 
please consider the related mails irrelevant, I found the following phrase "[…] distributed under the Python software license."
Thanks again!
~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 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.)
> 
> 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.
> 
> - Josh

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 1762 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/attachments/20131210/fd13d764/attachment.p7s>


More information about the macports-dev mailing list