[racket] License on PLaneT packages?

I try to put a license file and appropriate statements in the documentation
and code for all of my PLaneT packages. [Remember that the license for the
code may be different that that for the documentation.] I've almost
certainly missed doing that sometimes.

So, I think it would be good to make it easy (or a firm requirement) to
supply the license(s) in the meta-data.

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Matt Jadud <jadudm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I thought it was neat to see someone submit a Firmata library to the
> Planet.
>
> http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=firmata.plt&owner=xtofs
>
> That said, it contains nothing whatsoever about a license. I can't
> remember: does the package metadata have an explicit license field?
> Should it be a required field?
>
> I poked a few libraries in the list; Untyped seems to be reasonably
> fastidious about including a LICENSE file, but this doesn't show up in
> the metadata. The handful of other libraries I looked at contained
> nothing in the docs or the code w.r.t. either copyright or license.
>
> Does this matter? When a GPL'd piece of Racket code does a planet
> require and pulls in code of unknown provenance... is it pulling in a
> binary? Source? Is that code still GPL'd, or is it now in violation
> (or some other confusing state of being)?
>
> Just to spot check what other communities do, I looked at CPAN. (No
> doubt mentioning CPAN in the same message as PLaneT could start a
> flame war, but that's not my intent...)
>
> http://www.perlfoundation.org/cpan_licensing_guidelines
>
> They require a clear license.
>
> I don't really do enough hacking/contributing in the PLT space at the
> moment for this to be much more than a "troll" in some ways, but it
> certainly isn't meant that way. It's just that I was glad to see a
> connectivity layer for working with the Arduino appear, and then
> realized that the code wasn't licensed in any way... raising questions
> about how I could use it in my own programming.
>
> Cheers,
> Matt
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