Re: Legal Risk (was Re: Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

[Russell Haley <russ.haley@...>]

  Original Message  
From: Philipp Janda
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2016 6:40 AM
To: lua-l@lists.lua.org
Reply To: Lua mailing list
Subject: Re: Legal Risk (was Re: Re: ActiveState seeking Lua community feedback

Am 13.11.2016 um 14:02 schröbte Lorenzo Donati:
> On 07/11/2016 02:50, Martin wrote:
>> On 16-11-04 12:00 AM, Philipp Janda wrote:
>>> ["GNU GPL v3"] = 4,
>>> ["GPL-3"] = 214,
>>> ["GNU/GPL 3"] = 2,
>>> ["GNU GPLv3"] = 3,
>>> ["GPL v3"] = 9,
>>> ["GPLv3"] = 14,
>>
>> Ugh. Looks like some license name canonization wouldn't hurt.
>>
>>
> +1.
>
> Exactly what I thought when I saw that list.
>
> This could also avoid misunderstandings: although the ones you cite are
> clearly the same license, there could be well cases (TL;DR) where a
> different spelling could actually mean a license variant (e.g. "generic"
> MIT vs. MIT/X11 vs. whatever).

There is a *lot* of confusion about MIT vs MIT/X11, and many Lua 
libraries claim MIT/X11 in their rockspecs, but the LICENSE files 
themselves are plain MIT (aka MIT/Expat).

>
> Sadly I fear this could mean building a repository of
> "LuaRocks-approved" license IDs, so more work for the LuaRocks team.

It's not that simple. Many Lua libraries are bindings to C or C++ 
libraries, and the license for the binding (often MIT) could differ from 
the license for the C or C++ library. And of course you can release your 
library under multiple alternative licenses. So it's not just IDs, but 
probably a little DSL ...

Anyway, currently the license field in the rockspec is a free-form 
string field, and that probably won't change for LuaRocks 2.x for 
compatibility reasons, but there is still time for improvements for 
LuaRocks 3.0 ...


Philipp


p.s. Since there was interest in the script I'll attach it, but it 
requires a local mirror of all rockspec files of LuaRocks.org (about 
4000 of them, ATM). I'll add a script for downloading those as well.

+1‎