On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 2:14 PM, Joshua Root wrote: > On 2013-7-8 18:39 , Mojca Miklavec wrote: >> On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Joshua Root wrote: >>> >>> Be careful not to conflate "free", "permissive", and "distributable". >> >> Like Ryan said: I have no idea what each term means and I'm not an >> expert (and don't want to be). > > Getting this stuff wrong potentially causes us to break the law. You > don't have to be a legal expert, and I'm certainly not one, but you do > need to at least read and understand the software's license, and make > some effort to think through its implications, before you set the > license field in a portfile. > > "Free" has no special meaning for us and is kind of a fuzzy term in > general use. "Distributable" simply means that we are allowed to > distribute binaries. That's not used in the license field, because > whether we can distribute a port depends on its dependencies' licenses > as well as the port's own. > > "Permissive" for us roughly means a license that has no more > restrictions than the MIT/X11, (new) BSD, or zlib licenses. Because it's > a general category rather than a specific license, it shouldn't be used > for any license that conflicts with another license, since those > conflicts will be specific to that one license and not the entire category. > >>> This is certainly not as permissive as MIT or BSD, and it looks to me >>> like it would conflict with the GPL. Debian agrees: >> >> So in short: Should I use one of those terms (say, "distributable", if >> permissive is not appropriate) or should MacPorts core know about the >> Geant licence? > > Not sure. At worst you could probably call it Restrictive/Distributable.
I checked the binary distributability with port_binary_distributable.tcl -v geant4.9.6 It turns out that iAIDA's dependency grace->pdflib makes iAIDA nondistributable, but iAIDA doesn't seem to be required for Geant4 any more. (On the other hand Geant4 doesn't provide any switch to turn it on or off - it's used if it's found.) If I remove iAIDA from the list of dependencies then: - "Permissive" lincence allows distributability of Geant4 - "Restrictive/Distributable" licence prevents distributability because of root's dependency on gsl which is 'GPL-3+' I tried to remove +gsl from Root and then it would be stuck at root->graphviz->gts->jbigkit. So after removing "+gsl +graphviz" from root and removing "iAIDA" from Geant4, Geant4 becomes binary distributable if "Restrictive/Distributable" licence is used. The reason why I'm so concerned about binary distributability is because it takes ages to compile Geant4 (I think it's 40 minutes on 2 core 2,26 MHz laptop). But I guess that there is not much that could be done in this case? Mojca _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev