Re: [gentoo-dev] Duplicate licences

[Peter Cech]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 02:59:39PM -0700, Joshua Baergen wrote:
> Joshua Baergen wrote:
> >The reasons that this system was chosen were correctness and
> >maintainability.  Many of these essentially use the good old MIT
> >license with various companies' and/or individuals' copyrights at the
> >top, as you have stated.  However, the MIT license does refer to the
> >copyrights within the license script itself, and many of the licenses
> >have been slightly altered to include a company's name directly.  I'm
> >no lawyer, but to me this means that the license does indeed include
> >the copyright.  (Note that I'm not intricately familiar with other
> >licenses that often have copyrights associated, so I don't know if MIT
> >is unique).  If this isn't correct, I'd be very happy to switch all
> >the packages that use various forms of the MIT license over to it
> >instead and you can blissfully ignore the next paragraph.  However,
> >I'd rather be on the safe/correct side than save a few MB that have to
> >be downloaded once.
> >
> ><snip>
> >
> >Joshua Baergen
> I'd still like clarification on this.  I fully realize that we've been
> using generalized placeholders for a long time, but that doesn't really
> matter in the end if it's not legal.

What leads you to believe the license texts distributed in portage tree
are legaly binding with respect to the packages? Each packgage carries
(or at least should carry) its license embeded inside. In my
understanding, licanse pointers in ebuilds are purely informative and
allow you to check the terms of the license (and decide if the license
is acceptable) before you actually perform any legaly binding action
(like running 'emerge app-foo/bar').

Regards,
Peter Cech
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