[Nix-dev] Re: Specifying licenses on Nix packages

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi again,  :-)

ludo at gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> What are you replying to?

For some reason, your initial message didn’t make it through Gmane (!).
For those who missed it, here it is:
http://mail.cs.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/2010-February/003911.html .

We quickly discussed it at FOSDEM, but I’d like to summarize my
position.

If find the “license calculus project” you have in mind interesting, but
I’m skeptical about its practicality.  The reason is that this whole
idea assumes that legal texts written in natural languages, subject to
human interpretation, can be reasoned about in a mathematical way.
I think this assumption doesn’t hold, unfortunately.

Even if the interpretation of law and licenses were unambiguous, stable
in time, context-independent, etc., other practical issues would make it
very hard to automatically reason on software licensing.

A few examples:

  * What is “the license” of OpenOffice.org?

  * What is “the license” of Teeworlds?  (It’s home-made.)

  * What is “the license” of GNU Guile once you’ve typed
    ‘(use-modules (ice-9 readline))’?  (libguile is LGPLv2+, but that
    module is GPLv3+ as it dlopens GNU Readline.)

  * Is the Open Font License (OFL) FSF-free? (See
    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.gnu-linux-libre/406
    for a discussion.)

  * Can you write a predicate that tells whether a given library is a
    “System Library” according to the GPL?

    ...

As a Free Software supporter, I’m taking the straightforward approach of
removing software that doesn’t correspond to my policy:
http://repo.or.cz/w/nixpkgs-libre.git .  Join us now, share the
software!  :-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.science.uu.nl/pipermail/nix-dev/attachments/20100222/a1fa0f11/attachment.bin