Bug#809705: general: let people use non-free software but opt-out of non-open software
Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>Another one that is worth mentioning here --- which I discussed in
> the
> context of non-free.org with Dafydd Harries and others --- is
> introducing a debtags facet to capture the reason why a package is in
> non-free.
I'd still say that solving that via debtags isn't actually solving the
issue (which doesn't mean that it would be nice to have it in Debtags
as well).
I guess not all software which is in Debian an makes use of apt repos
understands debtags, so until that is fixed (which easily takes
forever as new packages that do business with apt repos arrive), there
would be still "holes" through which non-open software could hit a
system.
And, as said before, it's far easier to accidentally forget setting
the "this is closed source" debtag, than to move it to the wrong
suite, the later would probably at least be checked by the
ftp-masters, right?
And even *if* it would work out, that all closed-source packages have
the right debtag set and no apt package installs them, these packages
would still show up, in package listings, perhaps when doing apt-get
source and so on.
Johannes Schauer wrote:
> Also, can the reason why something is in non-free not be captured by
> increased
> and a more structured use of DEP-5 (machine-readable
> debian/copyright)?
>
> Certainly I'd welcome support of apt for both: debtags *and* licenses
> in
> debian/copyright :)
>
> My own motivation to have better control over non-free is my package
> ldraw-parts which is released under the "Creative Commons Attribution
> Licence
> version 2.0" and thus non-free. I can imagine that more people than
> just me
> would find that license acceptable enough.
That sounds perhaps more like something for debtags, but this also
doesn't have the security motivation as my proposal.
You're package is likely less "worse" than non-free, while what I'd
consider for "non-open" is "worse" than "non-free" (it's not even
open).
I'm not a Debian developer, does anyone here know or has some
estimate, on what it would actually take in terms of effort to add
another suite like the "non-open" (or "closed-source") I had proposed
in the beginning?
Are there any technical, organisational or other arguments against it?
At least to me, though my knowledge may be too limited, it seemed like
a proper solution to be able to have closed-source software in Debian
repos in general, but also to be able to *completely* shut them out.
And that seemed quite appealing, at least more than the debtags based
approach.
Thanks and best wishes,
Philippe.
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