On Thursday 03 Feb 2011 03:03:04 Eberhard Moenkeberg wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, 2 Feb 2011, Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday, February 02, 2011 12:27:10 pm jdd wrote:
the licence problem is an open source nightmare :-(
Once upon a time, small number of licenses was competitive advantage of open source.
Maybe it is still better. It depends what number is growing faster, one per vendor, product and version, or all combinations of few basic licenses in all software packages.
"Few basic licenses" has to be the goal, everything else will "feed the enemy" in one way or the other. Yes, will, not would.
It would be nice, in theory. In practice we do not have control over the amount of licenses that we see in the various packages. Upstream authors use various licenses (thankfully the majority are the usual suspects) and various variations on licenses. If we were to limit our 'accepted' licenses to a bare minimum, how would you suggest handling: (a) lesser know licenses in an upstream package (b) a variation on an 'accepted' license For what it's worth, I think the work that Fedora has done on classification is quite good: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing Also note that there is momentum on harmonising the RPM license tag - not on _what_ should be entered there (each distributor may come to a different conclusion on what the effective license of a binary is) but _how_ it is entered there. The idea would be to see some consistency in how a license is declared (GPL v2 or later, GPLv2+ GPL Version 2 or later) as well as how combinations of licenses are declared (e.g. using a semicolon to denote aggregation - GPLv2+;CDDLv1.0 could be used to show that both licenses are present in the binary, whereas GPLv2+ and CDDLv1.0 would show that there is a choice/dual license). Again, have a look at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing and the latest specification of the SPDX format: http://www.spdx.org/wiki/working-version-license-list Ciaran -- Ciaran Farrell __o cfarrell@suse.de _`\<,_ Phone: +49 (0)911 74053 262 (_)/ (_) SUSE Linux Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstrasse 5, 90409, Nuremberg, Germany /ˈkiː.ræn/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org