Re: Show the license of package in ELPA website.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Zhu Zihao [2022-05-07 13:01:33] wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> The packages on NonGNU ELPA may use another license but only if it's
>> compatible with the GPLv3+.  IOW that should be distributable under the
>> GPLv3+ license, and AFAIK it's the only thing users need to know.
>>
>> If they really want to know that the code is using a more permissive
>> license, I think it's OK to leave it up to them to do the work to find
>> out.  Since most ELisp code will necessarily have to be linked with the
>> rest of Emacs to be useful, there are very few opportunities for users
>> to take advantage of a more permissive license anyway.
>
> I'm working on GNU Guix packaging. When I package the Elisp package on
> NonGNU ELPA, it's better to respect the origin license of the package
> rather than marking them all GPLv3.  Providing the license of package can
> help simplify the work of distribution maintainers.
>
> For Guix, we have a package importer which import package from other
> package hosting sites like ELPA automatically. And now the package
> importer for ELPA cannot grab the license of package because NonGNU ELPA
> doesn't provide them.

If you take them from NonGNU ELPA, you *can* label them as GPLv3+.
It's simple and technically should be correct, tho admittedly not optimal.

You can also opt to try and be more faithful to the upstream license,
but I suspect in that case you'll find that some of those packages don't
use the same license for all their files so you can't always just stick
a single license over the whole package.

Also, to be clear: I'm not opposing the addition of license information
in the NonGNU ELPA site.  It's just that currently there's no support to
provide that info anywhere and I'm not interested in doing the work
needed to add support for it (especially since I consider licensing
ELisp code under something else than GPLv3+ to be ... misleading).

But I wouldn't mind incorporating someone else's patches to add such
support :-)


        Stefan