On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 09:29 PM, Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:
<snip>
so we must not distribute any 3p (third-party) packages from asf systems if it is not permitted by their licences. nor may any of our code automatically go off and fetch such packages and start using them on the user's system if the packages' licences require *any* sort of acknowledgement by the user. that is, if the licence for package 'x' says the user must stand on its head and send a paypal donation before using 'x', none of our code may automatically download 'x' to the user's system. if it's *already* on the user's system, we can use it -- but we can't get into any position in which we are essentially responsible for transmitting someone else's licence terms to the user, and assuming they've agreed to comply with them. (i.e., for now i'm ruling click-through licences as not permissible for our stuff to present.)
what would be allowed (though) in these cases (i suppose) is *not* downloading the package but instead presenting the user with a nice message saying that 3rd party package XXX is required by function YYY - and giving an official url where it can be obtained.
this would be a *big* improvement over the situation (without automated download) where the user has to find out where a copy of the necessary package can be downloaded from.
- robert
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