Re: Clarifications of licences on pgfoundry

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 4:06 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> If, as you say, the licence is unclear then whether-or-not it is an open
> source licence must also be unclear.

I would suggest you, or anyone else who notices, open bugs on any
packages you want to use for which you find no LICENSE file matching
the license asserted in pgfoundry.

Are there so many that we need a more organized mass effort? Do we
need automated checks for this?

> The copyright holders can change the licence in future as they see fit,
> as we've witnessed on other formerly open source projects.

This is always true. The protection open source licenses have for this
is that they're irrevocable. So while NTT could stop releasing future
work under an open source license, the code which was already released
would still be available under the license it was released under and
anyone who wants to could pay anyone willing to support it without
asking NTT for permission.

The question that arises then is whether pgfoundry archives the source
it has in a way that the project maintainer can't delete. If an author
decides to stop releasing a package and deletes the source from
pgfoundry can we get the last version they released from pgfoundry and
put it back up as an orphaned project or with a new set of
maintainers? As long as we have the infrastructure to do that
conveniently I think we're protected against this danger.

--
greg