On 7 February 2011 07:21, Xyne <xyne@archlinux.ca> wrote:
Ray Rashif wrote:
Sorry, bad comparison, then. I'm not really sure what to compare it with. We've never had to talk about things like this before (so probably the time has come you would say). First of all, we've never had people claiming "rights" to PKGBUILDs.
I agree that it is unlikely to be a problem, but the best thing to do is deal with the eventuality rather than continue with naive optimism.
What needs to be done, imo: * decide on a permissive license or public domain for submitted files * add a clearly visible notification * add a note concerning the submission of files that cannot be redistributed, e.g. a copyrighted icon included in the upload * hope that no previous author ever shows up to claim copyright before the addition of the notice
Here is what Gentoo does for all their official ebuilds [1]: # Copyright 1999-2011 Gentoo Foundation # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 This also appears in all third-party ebuilds [2], so I would assume one written by an individual and distributed by itself would contain this same license note. In order for something like this to work for Arch, aside from official and third-party repositories, the AUR needs to (1) reject PKGBUILDs without the license header, (2) inject the header to every submitted PKGBUILD, or (3) display a note and assume contributors will take the initiative. None of those appeal to me, personally, but as far as this subject is concerned I abstain :) [1] http://gentoo-portage.com/ [2] http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/List_of_overlays