[openbeos] Re: unrar
- From: "Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 22:23:27 +0100 CET
"Matthijs Hollemans" <matthijs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >what about setting up another branch for less-than-ideal software
> > >licenses?
> > Sounds like a good idea.
> 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.
And why should we do this? We're still the ones in control, we can
always decide wether or not we want to have an application in our
repository or not - and for what reasons.
> Sure, it might be nice and more convenient to have these tools in the
> Haiku
> source tree, but where do we draw the line?
>
> 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.)
As Kristian already pointed out, this is not really true. We have lots
of different licenses in our repository, even in the core components
(ie. libstdc++, parts of libroot.so, freetype, shell tools, ...).
The important thing is, that these licenses must be compatible to the
MIT license and to what we're planning to do with our own distribution.
> Any code that violates these principles has no place in our
> repository, how
> inconvenient that may be.
We already have GPLd add-ons in our tree that interesting parties can
compile and run on their systems. That's defnitely not very convenient,
though.
I think the best way to handle those things is, as Fredrik suggested, a
separate pool, with a clear separation of what the license allows -
that would keep our main tree clean, and we're not losing options for
distro-makers.
At the very least, all additional software that we're placing in the
Haiku distribution (which is not sold for money) should be somewhere in
our repository.
> 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.
The MIT license is what *we* develop our code under. It's not the
license that covers all of Haiku; there is no such license.
Bye,
Axel.
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