Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/licenses

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 11:03:38AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
>   > Log Message:
>   > Add original (4-clause) and modified (3-clause) BSD licenses.
> 
>   Is there any chance we could call these by the number of clauses, please?
>   "modified" is such a general term.
> 
> I suppose it's possible, but it seems to be the standard term used to
> refer to such licenses.  3-clause is also ambiguous although so far no
> one has deleted only other than the advertising clause.

It may be the standard term (which I don't agree with, I for one do
not use that), but the next question anyone using it will be asked is
"do you mean the 3-clause licence?".  I believe it's better to try to
head off questions like that at the pass.
 
> license.mk already had these terms, so my commit was just rectifying the
> dangling pointer.  If we reach consensus on changing the terms and
> renaming the files, that's ok.
> 
> There's a larger issue that when assigning a LICENSE tag to a package,
> one has to diff the text of the package's license and the file that one
> is pointing to.  So the name is actually not as important as it might
> seem.

The issue is the name that the packages have, not their description. I
need to be able to see, from a package's Makefile, whether a package has
a 2-clause, 3-clause or other licence. This should be immediate, and I
should not have to look at the license to determine what that means.

A similar example - we do not refer to GPLv2 and GPLv3 as "standard
GPL" and "modified GPL".

Regards,
Alistair