> > I asked Colin privately about the RESTRICTED marker, and he replied with > > (paraphrased) "the license is nonstandard, and I didn't want to bother > > the release manager". I think the license is fairly clear, but I'd be > > willing to get (public) clarification of any issues you have. > > I think the license is quite clear too: > > "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, without modification, > is permitted for the sole purpose of using the "tarsnap" backup service > provided by Colin Percival."
I think that Colin's behaviour is misleading and contemptable. He is borrowing the preface of the BSD license, and then changing it at the end to mean exactly the opposite. This is a "look-alike" licence. We've seen licenses like this before. They have fooled people before; they have even fooled OpenBSD developers working on the base. Intel and RAlink did this with their firmwares as well -- used BSD license boilerplate but then changed a few words to create a licence which said nearly the opposite. (Eventually, step by step, partially due to pressure from me I will add, they backed down and things became more free). Darren Reed did the same with ipf -- we thought his licence was very similar to BSD in spirit and terms, but it turns out it was not. I think there should be a public backlash against all projects and people who use "look-alike" licence terms. > I don't think there's any possible way OpenBSD would be willing to > place restrictions on what users might do with the software, therefore > we may not redistribute it, so it's PERMIT_*=No. Right. As long as the marker is correct, the ports tree can point to non-free code. > Having it on a CD produced and sold from Canada certainly wouldn't > make that any simpler for him; however I think it's irrelevant as > after re-reading I don't think we may redistribute at all. Those of us making the CD trust the ports developers to create proper PERMIT labels. There are not that many packages on the CD, so it is not likely that a big error will ever be made. But because of their visibility when doing package installs, I am certain that other users of the packages have started relying on those labels to be correct. Once you create something which looks like it might perform a certain purpose, people will start relying on it :)
