Change macports-legacy-support license to BSD

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

The macports-legacy-support repository is currently under the MIT license, but the rest of MacPorts is under the 3-clause BSD license. It would be ideal if macports-legacy-support were under the same license as the rest of MacPorts​. Is that possible?

It depends on who holds the copyright on the code, which is probably whoever wrote it. If you wrote it, you can relicense it under any license you wish. But it looks like not all the code was written by you. Many of the files bear your copyright with the MIT license, but some don't. In src, getdelim.c, getdelim.h, getline.c, getline.h, wcsdup.c are under the 2-clause BSD license, and memmem.c is, strndup.c, strndup.h, strnlen.c, strnlen.h are under the 3-clause BSD license. Given that, relicensing the collection as BSD is probably fine, or even required; only the copyright holder may change the license, and since you didn't write those BSD-licensed files, you can't really claim now that they're under the MIT license.

The files that bear your copyright have the year 2010. Is that correct, or is that typo that should have been 2018?

[kencu (Ken)]

It's not under one license. As much as possible, when I started this as "snowleopardfixes", I went for Apple Open Source origins. When it was not possible to find, or use, AOS, then OpenBSD-origined files were used. Some of them were written by Chris, Michael, Mihai, Christian, and I.

Then TBH all of us have gone back and edited most of the files at various times, so there is no one clear authour to almost any of them any longer.

All of them however, AFAICT and to the best of our ability to determine, have permissive licenses that should be comfortable for users.

None of them are GPL-anything, and the term GPL does not appear anywhere in the repository for macports-legacy-support.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

The ​LICENSE file in the macports-legacy-support repository says it's under the MIT license. The ​Portfile says it's under the MIT license. If that's not accurate, it needs to be corrected. And my request that everything written for the MacPorts project use, as much as possible, the same license, stands.

[kencu (Ken)]

we can't change the license to BSD or MIT or anything else because it uses bits and pieces from many different sources, including Apple Open Source files.

So we're stuck with a mixture unless some lawyer can sort out a way through differently.

All the source is open for use, however, none is GPL3 or restrictive.