Re: On the license audit for Debian's TeX-related packages
Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br> wrote:
> Hi and thanks for the kind response, Norbert.
>
> On Oct 26 2006, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> Well, most of the RC stuff is fixed for now, but still, this is of
>> course always like a Damocles sword above us ...
>
> Well, nice that the RC stuff is done now, but I remember that the amount
> of work exceeded the manpower of the people dedicated to TeX
> maintainers, right?
"The RC stuff is fixed" means just that everything that we already found
to be non-free, and where there's no word from upstream that they are
about to fix it, has been removed. There are still some things that are
currently not licensed in a proper, DFSG-free manner, but upstream has
given promises: In these cases we should remember to come back to this
again "when it's time" (which is always a question of personal
judgement).
On the other hand, there are lots of CTAN packages that did not yet have
a license auditing. This will be a lot of work to do, even if each file
turns out to be free. However, I'd be surprised if we wouldn't find any
more non-free files. But the Release Managers said they won't delay the
release because of an estimation, so this is also not RC.
>> > So, would you have any pending task for them? I think that the tasks
>> > of dealing with repositories, version control systems, packaging for
>> > Debian etc I can teach them, but I don't know exactly what is the
>> > work that needs to be done, specifically (e.g., which packages are
>> > problematic).
>>
>> There are two areas:
>> - actual checking the licenses:
>> This is about updating the TeX Catalogue with correct/verified license
>> information. Normally it looks like this: Choose a package, get the
>> stuff from the nearest CTAN archive, check all the files for license
>> statements, MANIFEST files, etc etc etc. If you are sure what is the
>> license, update the TeX Catalogue entry for this package.
>
> Hummm, I think that even the algorithms package would have to have an
> update on the TeX Catalogue, as I have not claimed Copyright on the
> files that are there. :-)
Maintainer changes are one of the things that make license auditing and
fixing "interesting"...
>> - basic svn stuff, updating the TeX Catalogue uses
>> svn or sending the stuff to us.
>
> Ok, this is not a problem here, as I can teach them the basic use of
> svn. If their changes are worthy of trust, I hope that they actually get
> committ access.
>
> Knowing them, I think that this is something that both Victor and João
> Paulo will prove to be trustworthy soon to the community.
This is something we have to arrange with the Catalogue maintainers, I
think Norbert is known better there? Anyway, I assume João and Victor
are going to write some kind of report anyway for evaluation and grading
purposes, and so we can double-check some random samples of their work.
Or what's even better, they could just send their first results to us
with an explanation, so that we see how they work, and ask again if they
find something unusual or difficult. Free software is also about
helping each other ;-)
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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