Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #58 (Proposed): Add license value to package metadata

Malte, we are not putting anything into CVS which is not GPL licensed. On the other hand, there is no requirement that packages be GPL compatible in general and if someone wants to distribute a package with a non GPL compatible license that is fine; so I am not sure what to make of your post.

One minor point, it's probably not a good idea to default the license. In general you want license choice to be made explicitly. Also, it should be a requirement to provide a license when creating a package and we should probably have a link explaining the OpenACS policy with respect to putting only GPL code into CVS. We should go through and add GPL to the existing packages though.

Finally, at least for the GPL, simply indicating something is under the GPL is not adaquate according to the license, you have to place the license text itself in the package as well (it's term 1 of the GPL). When we distributed things as a monolithic tarball it was fine to have it in the root, but now that we distribute packages individually, we should probably add the license to each one (as annoying as that might be).

I think it's not really sensible to put something in to CVS with a GPL compatible license, since the first person who commits changes, retains copyright on those changes, and says their changes are only GPL licensed (which with a GPL compatible license is perfectly allowable and reasonable) coerces the license on the package to GPL.

You can fork any GPL compatible licensed code to a GPL licensed version in this way, which is the essence of what it means to be "GPL Compatible" and consequently I think in the interest of simplicity we should dispense with the pretext of allowing "GPL compatible" licenses in CVS.

If we did want to support alternate licenses in the code, we would probably have to have some way of having people formally accept that their changes fall under the compatible license. As it stands we probably should have people with commit sign something which says that and code or changes they commit are GPL licensed and possibly a "copyright disclaimer" (as mentioned in the GPL). See the Zope Contributor Agreement or the Mozilla contributor form for what something like this might look like.

Anyway, I don't want to be too pedantic about this license stuff, but I think we should get it right.