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On Sat, 21 Jan 2006 00:41:06 -0700 Joshua Baergen |
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<joshuabaergen@g.o> wrote: |
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| The reasons that this system was chosen were correctness and |
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| maintainability. Many of these essentially use the good old MIT |
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| license with various companies' and/or individuals' copyrights at the |
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| top, as you have stated. However, the MIT license does refer to the |
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| copyrights within the license script itself, and many of the licenses |
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| have been slightly altered to include a company's name directly. I'm |
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| no lawyer, but to me this means that the license does indeed include |
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| the copyright. |
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So you propose we go through and change every package in the tree that |
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uses BSD or MIT (or GPL with the copyright disclaimer)? |
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| Now, that splinters the licenses a good amount already, and thus |
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| maintenance becomes an issue. If one half of the licenses are |
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| unique, and we only keep unique ones, packages start depending on |
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| other licenses in a spaghetti-like fashion. We can't just go ahead |
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| and change any given license since it will mess up other packages |
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| dependent on that license. Like good programming practice, I would |
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| argue that less is not necessarily better. |
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Were that the case, we'd do as Debian do and distribute a licence with |
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every single package. |
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Every other package maintainer manages to get it right. That it's a bit |
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more work to do things properly is no excuse. |
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-- |
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Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (King of all Londinium) |
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Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org |
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Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm |
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