I definitely think that a passive approach is better. Debian, for example, has their repositories split into "free" and "non-free". I believe that this would be the best solution to this problem.
Click-through interactive licensing agreements are no stronger than passive licenses. The law is the law, and claiming ignorance is never a defense unless the law / license is deliberately obscured. Since we're not obliterating the license file, if we put the package into a non-free repo there should be no problems. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 1:42 PM, mabshoff <mabsh...@googlemail.com> wrote: > > > > On Feb 3, 1:27 pm, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: > > There is quite a bit of discussion going on at tickethttp:// > trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/4890about nauty's interactive > > installation that demands that a user agree to a license. I originally > > made that spkg and the result of the discussion at that time was that an > > interactive license was needed. There is strong disapproval of having > > an interactive license now. The end of the discussion on the ticket > > points to having a thread on sage-devel to address the question. For > > your convenience, here is the last comment: > > > > "> I would still not call this interactive error message "stupid" since > > > it was done deliberately. > > > > "I think interactive license agreements are annoying. They are all done > > deliberately. > > > > "> Nauty is not only non-free, but its license prohibits its use for > > > works involving primarily military applications, so this is not about > > > non-GPL vs. GPL. > > > > "Nauty is free as in beer, but the free license it is under is not > > "libre" i.e., not OSI approved and not GPL-compatible. Nauty's license > > is: "Permission is hereby given for use and/or distribution with the > > exception of sale for profit or application with nontrivial military > > significance." There are essentially no other restrictions. > > > > "Since we have a fundamental disagreement here, this will need to be > > discussed on sage-devel and possibly voted on." > > > > Note that in this case, apparently nauty is included in an (optional?) > > package we install with gap, so at least there is inconsistency here. > > The fact that nauty is part of some gap related spkg and we do not > have a warning there does not mean that we should proceed the same way > with the nauty.spkg also. I would in fact vote for either removing > nauty from the gap-essentials.spkg (unless it is only the bindings) or > also requiring an iterative license. A lot of things ended up in the > essential gap.spkg that these days would not even make it into Sage > without a lot of mandatory cleanup. > > > Does someone (William?, mabshoff?) want to explicitly state the proposal > > we are voting on? > > > > Personally, I don't care either way. I guess I've been weaned off of > > nauty for a while now, thanks to Robert's good code :). > > This is not free vs. non-free, the point it that no other piece of > free or commercial software either in the optional/experimental spkg > repo or otherwise available via a pexpect interface does not restrict > the user in any way on what to use that piece of software for. Nauty > does restrict the user. We do have a significant number of users who > the nauty restriction does apply to and I take offense of having the > ticket summary contain the word "stupid". The decision to make the > license agreement interactive was made after deliberate discussion on > sage-devel and the ticket IIRC. And people installing spkgs do not > first do a license audit, so the interactive spkg-install prevents > anyone from accidentally installing nauty when they should not. > > So I vote to keep the license agreement, but we can make it so that if > some env variable (maybe SAGE_MILITARY_USE_OK == yes) is set where no > one can claim to have set it by accident does skip the interactive > portion of spkg-install. The same should apply to whatever gap related > spkg that contains either nauty or nauty bindings and we should > consider splitting it off the spkg to make things simpler license > wise. > > > Thanks, > > > > Jason > > Cheers, > > Michael > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
