Licensing guidelines changes

Tom Lane tgl at redhat.com
Fri Aug 3 06:06:19 UTC 2007


Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> writes:
> The fun is just beginning, I think; we're trying to be correct in a
> way that most upstreams aren't.

Yeah.  The scheme seems to presume that upstream licenses fall into
a small number of categories, which I'm not sure is true.

One problem I've got in my package set is that mysql is GPLv2 (not +)
with additional permissions --- they're not LGPL, but they give
permission for their libraries to be linked with code that's under
certain other open-source licenses.  What do I do with that?  For the
moment I just marked it "License: GPLv2" but should I mention the
additional permissions, and if so how?

I'm also wondering about variant ways of phrasing BSD-style licenses.
I'm responsible for libjpeg, libpng, and libtiff, all of which I
consider to be BSD-spirit (that's not just guessing, I was involved
with all of them years ago) and all of which are currently marked
"License: BSD".  But they all are old enough to predate the convention
of using standardized license wording.  I was astonished to discover
tonight that spot's license list has "zlib/libpng" as a separate entry.
If that's not considered "BSD" then libjpeg certainly needs its own
entry, and I'm not too sure that libtiff doesn't.  Are we going to
insist on chopping our licenses that finely?  It seems like mostly a
waste of time to me, because none of those packages really intend to
prevent you from doing whatever you want with the code.

			regards, tom lane




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