Re: Clarifications of licences on pgfoundry

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 06:32 -0400, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 4:06 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> > If, as you say, the licence is unclear then whether-or-not it is an open
> > source licence must also be unclear.
>
> I would suggest you, or anyone else who notices, open bugs on any
> packages you want to use for which you find no LICENSE file matching
> the license asserted in pgfoundry.

I'm not personally going to do this, though I will point out to people
the dangers of imprecisely licenced software when they ask.

> Are there so many that we need a more organized mass effort? Do we
> need automated checks for this?

I would say so.

> > The copyright holders can change the licence in future as they see fit,
> > as we've witnessed on other formerly open source projects.
>
> This is always true. The protection open source licenses have for this
> is that they're irrevocable. So while NTT could stop releasing future
> work under an open source license, the code which was already released
> would still be available under the license it was released under and
> anyone who wants to could pay anyone willing to support it without
> asking NTT for permission.
>
> The question that arises then is whether pgfoundry archives the source
> it has in a way that the project maintainer can't delete. If an author
> decides to stop releasing a package and deletes the source from
> pgfoundry can we get the last version they released from pgfoundry and
> put it back up as an orphaned project or with a new set of
> maintainers? As long as we have the infrastructure to do that
> conveniently I think we're protected against this danger.

Well, whoever runs pgfoundry.org gets to make that decision. They may
choose how they respond if someone says "I request X, in the name of
PostgreSQL and open source, ...".

There may or may not keep archived copies. If they just keep a latest
backup, then once the developer quietly deletes stuff then its gone
forever. Who could monitor that to make sure it never takes place??

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com