[aur-general] AUR & Copyright

[Magnus Therning]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 11:59, Peter Lewis <plewis at aur.archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Monday 07 February 2011 11:23:01 Ray Rashif wrote:
>> 2011/2/7 Lukáš Jirkovský <l.jirkovsky at gmail.com>:
>> > I don't think it matters whether PKGBUILDs are software or not.
>>
>> It never did, but now it does :)
>>
>> > That sounds to me like saying "all bash scripts have to be under GPL,
>> > because BASH is licensed under GPL".
>>
>> If you want to look at it that way, then sure.
>
> Yeah, I can't see that there's any such /requirement/ for PKGBUILDs to be GPL
> just because bash is, but it does make sense to me that they should be. Most
> other Arch owned stuff is GPL, right?

My argument, or rather food for thought, was that PKGBUILDs are
modules for makepkg; they intimately integrate with makepkg so far as
that they aren't useful without it (or a complete re-implementation of
its API).  Not completely the same, but still similar to how kernel
modules integrate with the kernel.

There are no easily drawn lines in such an argument though, so I think
it would be better to explicitly state the license in the individual
PKGBUILDs.

> This also avoids the need to transfer ownership of the copyright to Arch,
> although doing so would make it easier to (for example) relicence under GPL 4
> or somesuch at a later date. The FSFE developed the Fiduciary Licence
> Agreement (FLA) just for this kind of thing:

Transferring copyright ownership is complicated and is likely to just
add a barrier for people who want to contribute.  I think it'd be
deeply ironic if Arch/AUR required people to transfer copyright in
order to contribute to a distro that held KISS as its most important
principle :-)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus