Re: Review of Non-US package list?
On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 01:04:06AM -0400, Frederick (Rick) A Niles wrote:
> Does the list of packages listed as "non-US" get reviewed from time to
> time? Looking over the list, it seems like all the SSL stuff is
> considered non-US. I understand why this was the case 5 years ago, but
> between RSA patent expiration and the export laws made less draconian in
> the past few years, it seems like many of those could be moved back in
> with the general population of packages.
Packages are gradually being moved from non-US/main to main. Those still
remaining in non-US/main in unstable are mostly there because either (a)
the maintainer isn't very attentive or (b) they have licensing
incompatibilities between the GPL and the OpenSSL licence which need to
be resolved. Packages in non-US/non-free will probably stay there, as
working out whether the new, less restrictive US export regulations can
safely be applied to them is much more difficult.
If you're talking about stable, then the new export laws were only
implemented in Debian very shortly before the last release (and in fact
that implementation was one of the things that held up the last
release), so the state of non-US in stable isn't very representative.
> While you're at it, giving a justification for why a package in
> "non-free" license doesn't qualify as a free software license would be
> nice too. I'm not asking for a 500 word essay per package, but I'm
> sure most of the non-US packages fall into one of 3-6 reasons and the
> license failures are probably for about the same number of reasons as
> well.
/usr/share/doc/*/copyright will often say. Failing that, it's usually
straightforward to compare the licence found there against
http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines and spot the parts that
don't fit.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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