Bug 193573

Summary: Mk/bsd.licenses.db.mk: LICENSE Public Domain; LICENSE Copyright by some author
Product: Ports & Packages Reporter: Kalten <kalten>
Component: Ports FrameworkAssignee: freebsd-ports-bugs (Nobody) <ports-bugs>
Status: Closed Not Accepted    
Severity: Affects Only Me CC: marino
Priority: ---    
Version: Latest   
Hardware: Any   
OS: Any   
Attachments:
Description Flags
LICENSE_PD (PublicDomain) variations from /usr/ports/ none

Description Kalten 2014-09-11 19:59:16 UTC
Created attachment 147225 [details]
LICENSE_PD (PublicDomain) variations from /usr/ports/

When I was searching for the right LICENSE entries for some ports—as
portlint(1) urged me to specify it—I realised that there seem to be
missing two cases:

* “Public Domain” license
* “Copyright © Hansi Wurzl” or some other author of software

So I looked into the “Porter’s Handbook”¹⁾ searching for every
occurrence of “license” and into the files Mk/bsd.licenses.db.mk
as well as Mk/bsd.licenses.mk, and searched for something that could
match “Public Domain”, and found nothing.

Then I did some grep(1)ping in /usr/ports/
 find /usr/ports/ -name Makefile\* -exec \
   grep -iHn "license.*public.*domain.*" {} \; > license_PD.txt

Complete variations used in those ports can be found in the attachment
LICENSE_PD_variations.txt

As you can see, it is an awful mess! :-(

Pray do add an entry like:
_LICENSE_NAME_PD=      Public Domain
to Mk/bsd.licenses.db.mk and do make the necessary other adjustments.

Some text about the handling of LICENSE in the “Porter’s Handbook”¹⁾
would be very welcome too and would reduce the mess—at least it would be
easy to point the errors out to the maintainers ;-)

--------

And what about the second case mentioned above—namely
“Copyright © Hansi Wurzl” or some other author of software?
How should one handle this case?

E.g.: software under GPLv3 “Copyright © Hansi Wurzl”  would be something similar to:
---8<---
LICENSE= GPLv3 Copyright_By_HansiWurzl
LICENSE_COMB=	multi
LICENSE_NAME_Copyright_By_HansiWurzl=   Copyright by Hansi Wurzl <root@freelove.tu-graz.ac.at>
LICENSE_TEXT_Copyright_By_HansiWurzl=   ???
LICENSE_PERMS_Copyright_By_HansiWurzl=  dist-mirror dist-sell pkg-mirror pkg-sell auto-accept
--->8---
I suppose? Or how should we implement that? (and the “???” are not good too ;-))

Again: some section in the “Porter’s Handbook”¹⁾ explaining this too would
be very welcome.

Thank you!
 Kalten
¹⁾ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/book.html
Comment 1 John Marino freebsd_committer freebsd_triage 2014-09-12 06:24:11 UTC
Public Domain licenses are intentionally omitted.  Doesn't it seem strange that such a common "license" isn't defined as a standard license?

This isn't the first PR to request this, I guess it will not be the last.  Moving to closed - REJECTED.  PD is not legally permissible in many jurisdictions.