[macports-ports] 01/17: cargo PG: modify comments

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Apr 28, 2018, at 04:31, Joshua Root wrote:

> On 2018-4-28 13:04 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> According to WikiPedia, "All rights reserved" has no effect in any legal jurisdiction:
>> 
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved
>> 
>> Unless anyone knows otherwise, we may as well remove it everywhere.
> 
> It's not even true since we explicitly grant rights to others in the
> license.

Here's an in-depth post about this problem:

https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/2121/mit-license-and-all-rights-reserved/4403#4403

It seems the phrase "All rights reserved" is contradictory and confusing in the case of an open-source license, and yet, it is part of the BSD license text. If we remove the phrase, can we still claim that we are using the BSD license?


>>> @@ -11,7 +12,7 @@
>>> # 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
>>> #    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
>>> #    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
>>> -# 3. Neither the name of Apple Computer, Inc. nor the names of its
>>> +# 3. Neither the name of The MacPorts Project nor the names of its
>>> #    contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from
>>> #    this software without specific prior written permission.
>> 
>> The attribution to Apple in the license text appears in many files, not just this one. This file certainly didn't originate from Apple, but some MacPorts source files did, and I don't know what the correct treatment of those files is. Do we change them to MacPorts, since we maintain the files now, or do we need to retain the mention of Apple in those files that Apple originated, possibly adding our name to theirs? And if so, do we change their name to Apple Inc., since that is their name now? If someone could look up what the legally correct thing to do here is, that would be great. Whatever the outcome, we should apply it to all files.
> 
> Apple definitely retains the copyright on any portions of the code that
> were written at Apple. Their copyright notices and license should not be
> removed. We add our own notices for the portions we write. We can either
> choose to distribute those portions under the same license as Apple's
> portions (including clause 3 which specifically mentions Apple's name)
> or we can add our own license in addition, and the combined work would
> be subject to both.
> 
> Personally I don't think clause 3 is a huge deal. The sort of things it
> restricts are probably restricted anyway in many jurisdictions. Not
> worth adding a second, slightly different license in the affected files IMO.

I'm not talking about removing or altering Apple's copyright notices; of course they should remain. I'm talking about clause 3 of the license, the non-endorsement clause.

I didn't claim we should add a second slightly different license in the affected files. I claimed that we should not state, due to copy/paste error, that Apple is involved in files they were not involved with. And in the files that they were involved with, I wondered if we can modify clause 3 of the license text from only mentioning Apple to mentioning both Apple and MacPorts.

The non-endorsement clause is gone entirely in the 2-clause BSD license, of course, but I don't know what would be involved with relicensing MacPorts under the 2-clause BSD license; it would probably be complicated.