Re: [gentoo-dev] mac/xmms-mac licence issue

[Brian Harring]

License in question...

http://bugs.gentoo.org/attachment.cgi?id=35862&action=view

On Sat, Dec 24, 2005 at 06:11:53PM -0800, Bret Towe wrote:
> earily today i updated the ebuilds for mac and xmms-mac,
> for those that dont know their applications for monkey's audio (.ape files),
> and got them submited to bug 94477[1] which was closed
> due to the way the licence was done

Original license really sucks... doesn't matter if someone has grabbed 
the code and labeled it lgpl2, it still is under the monkey license.


> my issue is i think the ebuilds should be commited to portage
> as i dont see how the licence or issues that app has anything todo
> with a gentoo ebuild as all the ebuild does is fetch and install
> and its only told todo so upon the user requesting it to be so
> hence its the users choice to deal with the licence rather than
> the developers desiding for that user

We're not deciding what licenses users should use (despite pushes from 
both extremes looking to enforce their license view on others).

That said, it's not actually the issue at hand.  Issue at hand is 
violating someone else's license (clarified below).

> i can understand putting proper warning in the ebuild if the dev
> thinks that its worth the user really noting the issues surrounding
> it, not forcing their ideals onto the user
> if i wanted that i would run debian

See above, and drop the rhetoric please.

>
> for those that havent figured it out yet from reading the above
> i dont care the politics of the issue with the licence all i want
> is the functionality of the ebuild concerned

Politics do suck.

That said, lawyers crawling up your ass sucks worse.

Bluntly, you're asking a collection of devs, who have their own 
contributions protected by licenses, to ignore a source base's 
license.  That's going to be one hard sell. ;)


> if it is the case that the devs believe the user is totally incapable
> of making choices for themselfs then i suggest putting up
> somewhere noting it as such

Again, ixnay rhetoric; if we violate the license (which we would be 
doing), we're responsible (along with user who uses it).

It doesn't matter if someone else has picked up the source and labeled 
it as lgpl, unless the new project has *express* permission from the 
original author, they're not even allowed to screw with the source- 
the new project could be viewed as a new program.

Barring the new program angle, there still is the requirement all 
fixes/changes be contributed back to the original upstream.

Original upsream being dead means it's effectively impossible to 
improve the source.

This is why the original license is a major issue.  Effectively, 
the codebase cannot be improved/fixed without the original author, due 
to restrictions keeping the code bound to him/her. If he/she goes 
mia, the project is dead developmentally due to the restrictions, 
which makes putting the package into portage an even harder sell.

Jakub responded in this thread about shipping a crap license... imo, 
that's not the issue.

The issue is that we would be knowingly violating a license (however 
horrid the license is).  

Two routes out of this- clean room reimplementation of the codec, or 
someone manages to track down the original author and gets the code 
converted to a different license.  Latter still is tricky, since any 
contributions to the project, you would need all authors to sign off 
on the new license- this is assuming the project doesn't do 
centralized copyright, and assuming people have actually contributed 
to it beyond original author.
~harring