Created attachment 156585 [details] patch It seems like the reasonable license to have "PublicDomain". When the author said "This code is in the public domain".
Well, being in the public domain is not a license, it's more the absence of it.
> Well, being in the public domain is not a license, it's more the absence of it. Mk scripts and portlint don't think this way. They keep complaining.
Yes, sure, portlint complains that the port's Makefile do not have a license defined. Which is fine by me, as the port does not have a license.
No, this will come up again and again. I already got some port bounced by committer because of portlint complaints. When author says "Public Domain" this is one thing. When the license is missing (like when the author didn't put anything, still thinking, forgot, whatever), or it is missing in port - this is another situation. You can't mix the two.
In the past when this has come up I've objected to adding a public domain 'license'. There are very few software products that actually lack a license (mostly products of the US government as well as a small selection of other things). Other products whose author claims are in the public domain, aren't. I'd very carefully read the contents here: http://opensource.org/faq#public-domain as well as the linked mailing list threads.
But BSD port system shouldn't be concerned with the legal intricacies of the public domain license definition. Such license will simply reflect the fact that significant number of authors believe that there is such license. There is also the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_software I recently made a port that claims to be in public domain. When I grepped in the port tree, I found ~45 ports that added such section: > LICENSE= unknown > LICENSE_NAME= Public Domain > LICENSE_TEXT= This software us in the public domain > LICENSE_PERMS= dist-mirror dist-sell pkg-mirror pkg-sell auto-accept Practically speaking, it is either this: > LICENSE= PublicDomain or more and more ports will have to copy-paste the above 4-line section with some variations. Such software is out there anyway, weather we like it or not.
LICENSE=PD support was added in r405874