Re: [OctDev] removal of non-standard licenses in Octave Forge

[Carnë D. <car...@gm...>]

On 28 October 2012 19:13, Carnë Draug <car...@gm...> wrote:
> Hi everyone
>
> we have a couple of files in Octave Forge with non-standard licenses.
> This is bad. Being able to give it a recognisable name not only eases
> our organisation but also its acceptance by downstream package
> maintainers such as Debian. From Debian's upstream guide "Please do
> not write your own license text if you can at all avoid it. Depending
> on your wishes, the GPL, LGPL or a BSD-style license will most likely
> be appropriate, and it is far easier to tell whether something is
> allowed if we can look at past discussions of the same text. "
>
> I believe that in most cases such user-made licenses are not made
> because there's no appropriate license out there, but out of
> indifference for the subject and belief on others better part. For
> example, some functions in the image package have the following
> license "This code has no warrany whatsoever. Do what you like with
> this code as long as you leave this copyright in place" which could
> easily be replaced by something such as the simplified BSD, FreeBSD or
> ICS license which I have already suggested to the original author.
>
> I'd like to propose that we no longer accept such non-standard
> licenses and propose this list
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses as
> the ones that are acceptable. Does anyone oppose to such change?
>
> Carnë

After 1 week there has been no opposition.

>From now on, only code under a license listed on
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses
will be released through Octave Forge.

Carnë