[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #16898: Fix plugins about page license requirement

[WordPress Trac]

#16898: Fix plugins about page license requirement
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 Reporter:  scribu              |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request     |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal              |   Milestone:  WordPress.org
Component:  WordPress.org site  |     Version:
 Severity:  normal              |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                      |
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Comment (by hakre):

 Policy here, policy there.

 Code has been taken into trunk already that is not licensing conform if it
 had been asked upfront what the policy of the original author(s) was (no
 need to drop names here, core had a similar issue and we solved it in the
 end, so I leave that same space as well for others).

 And this is more a policy thing than licensing itself. I therefore suggest
 to not enforce more than needed. The only "real" problem I see is that
 core contributors must respect the license if they pick code from a plugin
 or elsewhere - which is necessary any way. And if you take a look into the
 past - how often does it happen that plugin code goes into trunk? And more
 interestingly, when did that result into a licensing issue for trunk that
 could not be resolved in the end?

 And that's equally true for {{{GPL-2.0}}} plugin code (which was said
 earlier that this license should have had been enforced) - which would be
 technically incompatible with WordPress core now (for the matter of
 incorporating into core and distribution then (as discussed) and which
 probably was the original point highlighted by scribu with this ticket).

 So probably leave the code the air to breath it needs to live. And the
 coders as well. Consider that we discuss free software here, and I don't
 see a reason to limit our users right to use a a {{{GPL-2.0}}} plugin. Or
 a {{{GPL-3.0}}} plugin. Or a {{{Apache-2.0}}} plugin. Or a
 {{{BSD-3-Clause}}} plugin. Maybe something sound like the OSI approved
 licenses would be some guideline users are able to follow more easily. If
 not, make clear what you want and for what reason, so users who think
 about contributing their work to the plugin repository know what this is
 about. Maybe the most important part.

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 Related: #13067 - if software repositories are configurable, different
 opinions in the communities won't be an issue that much. Even if not
 imaginable first-hand, this can be a chance to improve the policy and
 guidelines for wordpress.org repository. If you consider to review the
 policy, please review that feature request as well.

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 @[comment:33 mikeschinkel]:
 If you're looking for identifiers for license names and versions, you
 might be interested in the [http://www.spdx.org/licenses/ SPDX Open Source
 License Registry]. For reviewing licensing of code, I found
 [http://www.fossology.org/projects/fossology Fossology] useful but you
 need to budget some time for setup and then for the actual review. I've
 never run it across the plugin repository myself.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/16898#comment:52>
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