On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 10:42:12AM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote: > Scripsit Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> > > On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 06:47:34PM +0000, Henning Makholm wrote: > > > Me neither. A "virtual debian-legal" would be something that analyzed > > > licenses: > > Only if you assume a virtual foo does everything the regular foo does. > No, but a virtual foo usually does *something* that the regular foo > also does. Since debian-legal's primary task is to analyze licenses, > that would be the natural expectation for a virtual d-l. RMS's primary task is to advance free software, not rant at people running non-free software too. > Renaming vrms to a name derived from "debian-legal" would be as much > an injustice to debian-legal as "vrms" is to RMS. I'm not sure you can do an injustice to a mailing list. > > > $ debian-legalint COPYRIGHT.foo > > > COPYRIGHT.foo:33: warning: mentions specific protocol standard > > > COPYRIGHT.foo:57: talks about "best efforts" to contact upstream > > > COPYRIGHT.foo:64: US export control laws > > > $ debian-legalint realplay > > Component: non-free > > Limitations: > > no-source > > non-debian > > no-redistribution > Apart from the syntactic details of the output format, how is this > different? It's trivial to write a program that tells you if an installed package is non-free -- that's what vrms does. It's non-trivial to write a program that tells you if the license in a text file is non-free. The reason it's trivial is that we've already done the analysis, and noted this down in the package's control file; it would be straightforward to do the same thing for other interesting properties of the package. Particularly things like "no-modify", "no-modify+dist", "no-redist", "no-redist-for-profit", "no-commercial-use", "no-autobuild". Being able to filter on these things would be useful -- it'd be nice to be able to point aptitude at non-free, but have it automatically ignore packages that you can't use because you're setting up a server for a business. Somewhat conversely, it might become valuable to have a "fsf-says-ok" tag that can be stuck on packages that aren't DFSG-free, but that the FSF thinks are free. > > Something like that would probably be both useful and feasible, > Feasible? Well, perhaps AI has made significant breakthroughs while I > was looking the other way, but I doubt it. Now, I was assuming that we'd pre-parse the licenses and have "legalint" just go from data in a /var/lib/dpkg/info/ file of some sort, but it occurs to me that in many cases, a fairly simple Bayesian analysis would probably do a pretty good analysis of most non-free licenses. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Australian DMCA (the Digital Agenda Amendments) Under Review! -- http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/copyright/digitalagenda
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