Bug#690495: Prohibit click-through licenses or disclaimers
Package: debian-policy
Severity: wishlist
Inspired by bug 689095, I'd like to suggest something like the following
as an addition to Debian Policy:
=====
Software in Debian should not prompt users to explicitly agree to
licenses, disclaimers, or terms of service in order to run that
software. This includes prompts to agree to Free Sofware licenses
(since such licenses do not require user agreement), warranty or
liability disclaimers, notices about possible legal issues, or
exhortations to use the software in any particular way. Software
designed to interact with a third-party service may pass through the
terms of service for that third-party service if required by that
service.
=====
The DFSG already prohibits click-through licenses, and likely terms of
service if they actually constitute a license; I only mentioned them
here for completeness. This policy change would cover disclaimers,
warnings about local laws, or similar. Also, I intentionally only
covered the case of prompting for agreement, rather than simply
displaying; plenty of software displays disclaimers or similar at
startup (for instance, gdb), but requiring user agreement seems like the
case worth prohibiting.
I didn't bother saying anything about software in non-free, since such
software may unavoidably have to prompt the user for agreement if the
license requires it, or if the license prohibits the modifications
necessary to remove it; I figured that limiting it to "Software in
Debian" (relying on the standard definition of non-free as not part of
Debian) would suffice for the cases I care about.
To the best of my knowledge, almost no software in Debian currently does
this, so this change would not make packages immediately buggy. I
intentionally made this a "should" rather than a "must" for now, because
I know of one package that already does this, and I don't intend for
this change to make any package immediately rc-buggy. The one package I
know of that does this, Transmission, I've already filed a bug on (bug
689095).
- Josh Triplett
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