[mercury-users] Mercury Anarchive proposal

[Ondrej Bojar]

Marcos Dumay de Medeiros wrote:
> There are two options of dealing with licences:
> 	1: You dictate the licences (LGPL + Artistic are ok) and everybody contribute 
> code on them.
> 	2: The archive manages multiple licences. If so, I can help with the manager 
> (but I'm new to Mercury).

If you are fine with 1, let's save the effort and go for it. In such case, you 
don't need to read further.

If you think 2 is really needed, I'll accept that but we'll spend an extra bit 
of time implementing that.

> I'm not sure that sourceforge will accept the second option (I don't know 
> their exact policy about that), but it is very likely they will if we 
> restrict it to free software.

I also do not understand exactly which logical connective do they see between 
the licenses you pick from their list. I assume it's and 'or' at the user's option.

If we go multiple licenses, the meaning of LGPL,Artistic,... would change a bit: 
it would be the union of all options of packages included.

What would be indeed helpful is if you could check Sourceforge's policy. Can we 
have parts of the project under different licenses (provided they're all free, 
as SF requires)?

>>...In principle, this ought to be easy:
>>
>>:- type license ---> lgpl; artistic; ... wish more?... .
>>
> 
> 
> If we go multiple licences, yes, I wish... There are some big lists already 
> done at FSF and OSI sites.
> 
>>Changing the license of a package would be just changing the README.term.
> That's good.
> 
> I'm looking at the manager right now to see how to add the licence. If you 
> want to use multiple licences, I can take a look at sourceforge policy either 
> and gather the list of licences... And whatever more is needed.

The current version of manager does not do any packaging and summarization yet. 
What I would like it to do in the future is:

manager -p package1 -p package2 --license

to print the licenses available for packages 1 & 2 and all required packages.
The user would then see if using these packages fits his needs even wrt. to 
licensing issues.

What I also plan to add in a near future is:

manager --summarize-all

to compile and test all packages and produce a single HTML report.
Surely, the report should list licenses per package.

If any of manager files or any of the READMEs need to explicitly mention 
Manarchive licensing, I would be grateful if you could propose the text and 
places where it should go.

Thanks, O.
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