Provide a way to specify licenses for each contained file.

[pjf]

Some mods will have multiple licenses for different assets (eg, code with one license, graphics another). The debian spec already has a way of managing this, we should do the same.

Luckily, the Debian spec makes it really easy, because it uses file patterns. Thus *.png *.jpg or images/* provide easy ways to tag a number of files at once.

Many thanks to @eggrobin for raising this. <3

[politas]

Not mentioned above is the point that Mod authors are able to dual or treble-licence their code and assets (or more). For instance, code can be released under both GPL and Artistic licences, allowing redistributors to choose which terms they want to accept. To be good FOSS citizens, we should pass on the same freedom of choice to our users, since we are making no modifications that require us to choose between licences. We certainly have no right to bind users to a GPL licence if the mod author has also released their work under WTFPL.

For the point above, that mod authors can license different elements with different licences in order to suit the type of content (or because they are including code and/or assets created by someone else based on previous licence provisions), this becomes a legal issue. We should be passing on licence information without modification if we are acting as a redistribution step. Selecting a single licence does not meet the legal requirements of the other licences.

Multiple licence information should be presented to users in the CKAN client, and NetKAN should support multiple licences.

[pjf]

Not mentioned above is the point that Mod authors are able to dual or treble-licence their code and assets (or more).

@politas: We've supported multiple licenses since at least 3a311bb, which pre-dates the existence of this ticket, and much of the CKAN codebase.

• https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN/blob/master/Spec.md#license
• https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN/blob/master/CKAN.schema#L67-L69

These should only be used when the whole mod is multi-licensed. (Eg: GPL or Artistic, which is common in the Perl community.)

[pjf]

As has been pointed out on IRC, whether or not he clients do the right thing may be another matter, but the spec definitely says we support multiple licenses, and so if anything doesn't that's a bug, not a design decision.

[politas]

Yes, the schema supports multiple licences, but neither the CKAN gui client nor NetKAN support them.

[pjf]

Yes, the schema supports multiple licences, but neither the CKAN gui client nor NetKAN support them.

Aww yis! You've found a bug! Opening a ticket now.

[pjf]

Now tracking the bug side of this in #966.

Having per-file licenses still remains a desired feature. :)

[pjf]

This ticket was almost an innocent bystander of the great merge. Re-opening. :)

[politas]

So, the current situation is that when different assets are covered by different licences, the "most restrictive" licence is presented/used. I've been looking for the discussion that lead to this policy, and I can't find it. Can anyone point me to it? I have contradictory arguments, but I don't want to just rehash previous discussions.

[pjf]

@politas : The discussion may have happened over IRC, but the guts of it is that we use (or will use) the license information to figure out if we can legally redistribute a mod. If a mod contains mixed content, then if any of that content forbids redistribution, that knocks out the whole zipfile. Other systems may also do the same.

Having said that, we should probably have a license string that indicates we're permitted distribution without modification. I think that RemoteTech is restricted (as some of the assets are non-free), but I believe redistribution of the work as a whole is permitted.

TL;DR: It's so our bots don't infringe.

[politas]

Ok, it sounds like this is an area that needs to be discussed in a way that is accessible. For a start, it can be difficult to assess which of multiple licences is the "most restrictive" if they are restrictive in different ways. For instance,commercial re-use clauses versus advertising clauses versus no derivatives clauses. If what we want is something that tells the bots whether they can redistribute a mod, we should have a separate field that stores that specific piece of information. It can be automatically filled based on a single licence, or it can be over-ridden to match a specific mod's multi-licence situation.