Ebuilds currently have LICENSE="as-is" which most likely isn't correct. There's no license included with the package, and there's also no information on the package's HOMEPAGE. Please clarify under what terms this package can be distributed.
CC treecleaner@ for package removal ->
License is "various". The themes were gathered from the old hewphoria page[1] which lost all data at some point. After that the page itself referenced[2] to this ebuild/distfile. The page back then[1] did not have the option to specify a license. The themes itself may contain a LICENSE file or the license is defined in the source file headers itself. Basically this is the only source/ebuild for those themes. Package removal because the license is unclear? Welp. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080910205339/http://hewphoria.com/?p=submission&type=theme&cat=1 [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120814205003/http://hewphoria.com
(In reply to comment #2) > License is "various". That's not a license. Generally, Gentoo is much more liberal concerning license issues than other distros (e.g. Debian). We can be, because we only distribute ebuilds and need not distribute the code of the package itself. However, in such cases where a package is not redistributable, it is our obligation to at least inform the user what are the terms. So, some degree of accuracy is desired for the LICENSE variable. > The themes were gathered from the old hewphoria page[1] which lost all data > at some point. After that the page itself referenced[2] to this > ebuild/distfile. > > The page back then[1] did not have the option to specify a license. The > themes itself may contain a LICENSE file or the license is defined in the > source file headers itself. In the SRC_URI tarball, there seems to be no license info at all: grepping for "license", "copyright", or "distrib" returns no results. Or did the original tarballs contain such info (and do you still have a copy of them)? > Basically this is the only source/ebuild for those themes. > Package removal because the license is unclear? Welp. It shouldn't have been added in the first place, unless its distribution terms were clarified by upstream. Now upstream is gone, which obviously doesn't improve the situation.
Of course "various" is not a license. If there is no license/copyright information in the themefiles, then that information is not given. Also there is no "original" tarball. Those are selected themes from the old hewphoria.com. Simple.
(In reply to comment #4) > Also there is no "original" tarball. Your reference [1] shows (now broken) download links for tarballs of individual themes. Does our tarball (the one listed in SRC_URI) contain the complete information from them?
I don't know. I did that meta-tarball five years ago. Everything I know about this has been posted here already.
For the time being, I've added mirror and bindist restriction, because we cannot safely assume that we're allowed to redistribute the tarballs.
Nothing for treecleaners to do here and it seems to me that everything is handled so far. Closing
Not fixed.
(In reply to comment #8) > Nothing for treecleaners to do here and it seems to me that everything is > handled so far. Closing Where did you draw that conclusion? The ebuild still has LICENSE="as-is" which is not true and we have nothing to put into place of it. +1 for treecleaning
(In reply to comment #10) > (In reply to comment #8) > > Nothing for treecleaners to do here and it seems to me that everything is > > handled so far. Closing > > Where did you draw that conclusion? The ebuild still has LICENSE="as-is" > which is not true and we have nothing to put into place of it. > > +1 for treecleaning But the package works doesn't it? Masked for removal because of an unknown license seems a bit far-fetched. Can't we just keep it with mirror and bindist restriction like Ulrich described in comment #7? If you still want to treeclean it then that's fine I will do it
(In reply to comment #10) > But the package works doesn't it? Masked for removal because of an unknown > license seems a bit far-fetched. Can't we just keep it with mirror and > bindist restriction like Ulrich described in comment #7? If you still want > to treeclean it then that's fine I will do it Since we can't leave it with 'as-is' in Portage and there is nothing to put into LICENSE="" field, this happens: $ sed -i -e 's:as-is::' *.ebuild $ ebuild pekwm-themes-hewphoria-20080921.ebuild digest $ repoman --without-mask full RepoMan scours the neighborhood... LICENSE.missing 2 x11-themes/pekwm-themes-hewphoria/pekwm-themes-hewphoria-20080404.ebuild x11-themes/pekwm-themes-hewphoria/pekwm-themes-hewphoria-20080921.ebuild Note: use --include-dev (-d) to check dependencies for 'dev' profiles Please fix these important QA issues first. RepoMan sez: "Make your QA payment on time and you'll never see the likes of me." So if it's not possible to commit packages to tree without licenses, how would it be OK to keep them in tree then? That doesn't make sense to me. Either fill up the LICENSE with correct information, or remove the package.
@ulm, doesn't exist any "license" fitting this kind of packages that are old and we are unable to know how were licensed (if they were licensed some day in the past)? (maybe public-domain?)
(In reply to comment #13) > @ulm, doesn't exist any "license" fitting this kind of packages that are old > and we are unable to know how were licensed (if they were licensed some day > in the past)? (maybe public-domain?) There is HPND, but it does not fit in this particular case, AFAIK
Created attachment 343118 [details] Some info on the themes collected at archive.org Attached is some info that I was able to collect from archive.org. Very few of the tarballs can still be found with Google, and their contents coincides with the respective subdirectory in the SRC_URI tarball. Conclusion is that there already was no license info in the original tarballs. Obtaining that info (e.g. by contacting all authors) seems unrealistic. OTOH, it looks like some themes with problematic license like Royale ("Ported from WinXP") or FatalE ("Original Author: Carbon, Originally for OSX") have been omitted from the tarball. (In reply to comment #12) > Since we can't leave it with 'as-is' in Portage and there is nothing to put > into LICENSE="" field, [...] (In reply to comment #14) > (In reply to comment #13) > > @ulm, doesn't exist any "license" fitting this kind of packages that are > > old and we are unable to know how were licensed (if they were licensed > > some day in the past)? (maybe public-domain?) > > There is HPND, but it does not fit in this particular case, AFAIK We cannot leave the LICENSE field empty, and the license certainly isn't HPND or as-is. And things generally enter the public domain only 70 years p.m.a. LICENSE="all-rights-reserved" would be a makeshift solution. Unfortunately, it is not possible here, because the tarball is not (and never was) hosted at the copyright holder's site. We don't know if it can be legally redistributed, so we also don't know if users can legally download it. I really dislike removing packages because of license issues, but I don't have a good idea what else we could do here. Blame hewphoria.com for not tracking the copyright and license info. @Licenses team: Any suggestions?
Ok then I will mask it for removal soonish and then we have more-or-less 30 days for someone to come up with a solution.
dropped
