[aur-dev] AUR 4 and licensing

[David Manouchehri]

> I don't really like the idea of all this red-tape, requiring one license
or
> another. So I have some concerns. Is there a plan to enforce this? If the
> PKGBUILD is trivial can you reasonably defend a license?

I don't think any of us expect there to be any real arguments from it.
There's not going to be much "defending" going on, the only likely
situation I can see is if somebody's package gets moved to [community] and
they're annoyed that somebody else is maintaining it now. GPL would help
clear that up.

Another thing is that some people upload copyrighted binaries by mistake.
Reminding the maintainer that the entire git/tar ball has to be under GPL
would probably help them avoid making that mistake.

Having the PKGBUILDs under GPL makes one less thing to worry about when
migrating it over towards [community]. Right now in theory you have to make
sure both the project /and/ PKGBUILD's license allows you to package it. By
asking all PKGBUILDs to become GPL, now all any future maintainers have to
do is look at the source.

> If I write a patch/etc is it under GPL or is it under the project's
original
> license?

I would say everything being tracked by the Git repo is GPL. So if it's an
external patch hosted outside of Arch, then no. Same concept with packages
like Dropbox that can't be repacked, so they list the source.

This seems fair, if you want free hosting on Arch, you play by Arch's
rules.

> Get rid of the TOS. I don't think the TUs want to become the license
police.

I don't think any of us were asking the TUs to police anything. No one was
suggesting having the TUs read through all 50,000 PKGBUILDs to check for
GPL violations.