Re: LICENSE in lang/perl5/Makefile

[Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>]

"Johnny C. Lam" <jlam%pkgsrc.org@localhost> writes:

> Klaus Heinz wrote:
>>
>> I just noticed that lang/perl5/Makefile contains
>>
>>   #LICENSE=gnu-gpl-v2
>>
>> Does this mean we chose the GPL of the two available alternatives
>> (GPL/Artistic)? 
>
> This seems like an oversight.  We want to redistribute under the terms
> of the Artistic license.

I don't see how our LICENSE tags affects terms; it is intended to
communicate to potential users, not to have any legal effect.  A
recipient of binary packages would seem free to choose terms from the
original package, following either choice from perl, regardless of our
LICENSE tag.

But I agree that this is messy.

>> I guess it makes sense to choose the same licence for all the Perl
>> packages that say "under the same licence as Perl" or use "license:
>> perl" in META.yml.
>
> Yes, this makes good sense.

It may be that we should add licenses/perl-license (perhaps just
referring to permission to copy under either gpl2 or artistic) and add
perl-license to DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENESES in license.mk.

The basic problem is that our licensing framework does not have a way to
express dual licensing such as perl's, and also can't express that one
must simultaneously comply with multiple licenses in order to
redistribute.

The real question is how hard to try to fix the underlying expressivity
problem, keeping in mind that performing logic with legal documents
basically doesnt' really work, and how hard to try to accomodate common
multiple-license situations.  I don't have a strong opinion yet.