Haiku Package Licenses

[lelldorin]

I does not can use as license "freeware", this is some times a problem if you want to make a package of an old beos app for a repository. This are often licenses as "freeware".

Will be fine then i can add this license in a hpkg file.

[pulkomandy]

"freeware" is not a license. Is it free only for personal use? For both personal and professional use?

You can include a custom license in the package, but it has to have a different name for each package because it's rarely the exact same terms.

The license should go in data/licenses inside the hpkg file, and usually in these cases we give it the same name as the package. It should include the exact license terms of the original package (usually there are some words in the README or user manual about what you can or can't do).

[michel]

Lelldorin is right: many old BeOS apps date from a time before we all became obsessed with licenses and contain only an executable.

If source code is supplied, one can also scan the comments in there. sometimes you will find something there.

If all else fails, I have been doing the following:

If there is no source code and nothing in the README, I create a custom license as Pulkomandy describes above that contains the following words: "In the absence of evidence to the contrary, foobar is regarded as copyrighted freeware"

IANAL, but I believe that should give us 3rd-party packagers legal cover. In the very unlikely event that the original author sends me a cease-and-desist letter, I can always pull the app from my repo.