Junio C Hamano: > An open source hosting site can help better by checking at the > project creation time, because the people who interact with that > interface are solely in the position to set and publish licensing terms.
That doesn't help with the many projects that have *already* been created. E.G., GitHub has a license chooser now, but didn't for years, and it's still optional. Also, repos stored as shared filesystems don't do that kind of checking. More importantly, focusing on the "hosting site" doesn't warn people who *clone* from repos. The people who take on legal risks are often not the posters, but the people who clone *from* the sites. Thus, *they* are the ones who need the warning, and git is in an especially good spot to detect the issue. > The general consumer who are cloning and fetching do not > have direct control over this, and the only thing the could do to > nudge the publishers is with an out-of-line communication... That's an option, but another option is to NOT use it. Often people have no idea there's an issue, and in their rush and lack of warning they forget to check the basics. > An approach that checks only the top-level directory for fixed > filename pattern would not be an effective way to protect the > cloners, either. I disagree, I think it's remarkably effective. *Many* projects do this, including git itself. After all, many humans need to find out the licensing basics too; having a simple convention for *finding* it helps humans and tools alike. It's not even limited to open source software; developers of proprietary materials (software or now) *also* typically want to declare licensing. Sure, the top-level licensing text might be incomplete, but having that information provides a big help, and it's what most people rely on anyway. Indeed, a *lack* of this is a sign of trouble, which is exactly what warnings are good for. --- David A. Wheeler (P.S. I posted this previously but it seems to have failed for some reason, so I'm resending this in a different way.) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
