Re: dpkg/license related proposal
In article <19991101210959.A6607@friko3.onet.pl>,
Tomasz Wegrzanowski <maniek@beer.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 01, 1999 at 02:48:46PM -0500, Amy Fong wrote:
>> A short while ago, I was pondering on all the things that happen
>> consequences of people being "whatever (fill in the blanks)" of licensing
>> situations and I have a bit of a proposition to make.
>>
>> Perhaps there chould be a field within Debian packages which specifies what
>> license a package is under. Before unpacking a package, dpkg checks to
>> see if the relevant license has been read, if not, it presents it to the
>> user and the user reads it and either acknowledges/accepts or rejects
>> it. This could be done by keeping state info on which license/version
>> has been read or (I think this one's better) by having each license as a
>> package. Obviously, if the user rejects the license, measures could be
>> taken.
>
>This would be VERY irritating.
>Such FEATURE is already part of M$Win98.
>If someone want to read a licence he knows where to find it.
The motivation behind this is due to certain in-duh-viduals being
completely clueless about the GPL and other licensing issues. IMHO, it
indicates that there needs to be a method to inform users. It's designed
to inform and to protect, not to irritate.
Further, by having licenses as say a package, it offers a measure of control
over how many licenses are involved. Not being too into all the legals, I'll
make a statement which may result in being pelted with tomatoes but anyways,
unlikes the world of windoze, (from what I've observed) there's not that many
licenses involved and since my proposal's a read only if user didn't read thing,
it shouldn't theoretically be that bad.
The GPL's an important part of open source infrastructure, it should be promoted
and enforced, let's not hide it.
Amy
.
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