[openbeos] Re: unrar

Matthijs Hollemans wrote: 
This is dangerous. If we're not careful, this sets a precedent for adding
all kinds of non-MIT (or even worse, non-open source) code to the
repository.

MIT or not-MIT is less important as most opensource/freesoftware licenses are compatible and btw. allows for commercial use. The license for unrar looks somewhat like the license for the Bitstream-fontcollection (Bitstream Vera Sans Serif, Serif and Sans Serif Monospaced)


Sure, it might be nice and more convenient to have these tools in the Haiku
source tree, but where do we draw the line?

All licenses which grants you the right to redistribute the software in a distro obtainable for free (as in beer) AS WELL AS for charge, can be used without problems. All licenses denying you the right to redistribute in a distro for a charge and/or for free _should_ be avoided.


The license that was chosen for the project is the MIT license and all code
should really live up to the terms of that license. (As a reminder: These
terms allow commercial use of the code, by anyone.)

There are a gazillion of licenses in the sourcetree by now. Some of these are incompatible with the MIT-license, because they don't allow commercial distribution without further special licensing.


Any code that violates these principles has no place in our repository, how
inconvenient that may be.


Agreed.


If this is a problem somehow (or too much of an inconvience), then maybe the
MIT license isn't the proper one for this project.

-Matthijs



The MIT-license could be replaced, but this would cause greater problems in relation to compatibility with other licenses. But it could be replaced, but it wouldn't make anything easier.

Just my opinion. However, some licenses are likely to be void in Europe and again some other licenses are likely to be void in USA. In general I'd said _screw the licenses_ and clean out the problems later - if need be.

/Kristian Poul Herkild

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