Geant4 Licence and binary distributability

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2013-7-8 18:39 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Joshua Root wrote:
>>>
>>> Be careful not to conflate "free", "permissive", and "distributable".
>>
>> Like Ryan said: I have no idea what each term means and I'm not an
>> expert (and don't want to be).
>
> Getting this stuff wrong potentially causes us to break the law. You
> don't have to be a legal expert, and I'm certainly not one, but you do
> need to at least read and understand the software's license, and make
> some effort to think through its implications, before you set the
> license field in a portfile.

While I understand this, I still have an impression that sometimes not
even lawyers agree. I remember Mozilla re-licencing LPPL files into
some tri-licence to make them compatible/distributable with Firefox
and the LaTeX people (the experts for licencing TeX) arguing that
according to their understanding of the LPPL licence, this shouldn't
be permitted. Go figure.

> "Free" has no special meaning for us and is kind of a fuzzy term in
> general use. "Distributable" simply means that we are allowed to
> distribute binaries. That's not used in the license field, because
> whether we can distribute a port depends on its dependencies' licenses
> as well as the port's own.
>
> "Permissive" for us roughly means a license that has no more
> restrictions than the MIT/X11, (new) BSD, or zlib licenses. Because it's
> a general category rather than a specific license, it shouldn't be used
> for any license that conflicts with another license, since those
> conflicts will be specific to that one license and not the entire category.
>
>>> This is certainly not as permissive as MIT or BSD, and it looks to me
>>> like it would conflict with the GPL. Debian agrees:
>>
>> So in short: Should I use one of those terms (say, "distributable", if
>> permissive is not appropriate) or should MacPorts core know about the
>> Geant licence?
>
> Not sure. At worst you could probably call it Restrictive/Distributable.

OK, I can put "license Restrictive/Distributable" to the Portfile
then. Just a question. I see that some ports, for example
textproc/canna, add a few clauses to the license:

    license         Restrictive/Distributable BSD-old GPL-2+ MIT

Does that mean that one could use

    license         Restrictive/Distributable Geant4

or is this not desirable? I really don't know anything about the
policy of what needs to be put to the license field in MacPorts (what
MacPorts expect there).

Thank you,
    Mojca