License compatibility issues?

[Mike Meyer]

After a discussion on another list, I'm wondering if anyone has ever done
anything to verify that the license requirements of the dependencies of a
package (I don't know of any licenses that would cause problems for a port,
as those don't involve distribution of derived works in the form of a
binary) are actually met? For instance, a port licensed under the EPL that
is statically linked with a GPL'ed library would produce a binary that
couldn't be legally distributed.

Searching google didn't turn much up, but I do notice that bsd.license.txt
doesn't worry about the license requirements of dependencies. Since it is
run at build time, this isn't a problem, as the license issues we deal with
will turn up when the dependencies are built. But incompatible licenses
don't seem to be dealt with at all.

Maybe I just need better google search words?
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Re: License compatibility issues?

[Charles Swiger]

On Mar 6, 2015, at 1:39 PM, Mike Meyer m...@mired.org wrote:
 After a discussion on another list, I'm wondering if anyone has ever done
 anything to verify that the license requirements of the dependencies of a
 package (I don't know of any licenses that would cause problems for a port,
 as those don't involve distribution of derived works in the form of a
 binary) are actually met?

Yes.  It is considered the responsibility of the port maintainer to
set NO_PACKAGE, RESTRICTED, etc appropriately for the default port options
so that the precompiled packages provided by the FreeBSD project are
legally OK to redistribute.

If an end-user chooses to select different dependencies, then they are
responsible for those choices.

 For instance, a port licensed under the EPL that is statically linked with a
 GPL'ed library would produce a binary that couldn't be legally distributed.

That is a concern, but end-users of the ports can still compile the two together
and use the result, even if they cannot legally redistribute the combination
to others.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck

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