description

A comment left on my blog post makes a good point. The commenter is having issues hunting down the licenses of components he wants to use. His comment follows:

Obviously, I can hunt authors (though it is much more inconvenient for me to find ways to contact author than for author to provide a license).

However this is step backwards from most places I got binaries before (Google Code/CodePlex/SourceForge), since in *all* of them license is mandatory.

Also, there are ton of developers who will not do the hunt and either ignore the package out of fear for unknown licensing or just use without caring about a license (which in the case of GPL in commercial project may be a critical problem later on, if unnoticed in time).

Final point is that if license is mandatory, it is possible to automatically prove licensing correctness for a used set of packages, which nicely solves the unnoticed GPL problem.

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