Re: summary of software licenses in non-free
[CCing -devel as I am making a technical proposal, see below.]
On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 06:57:09PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
> so, what exactly is in non-free?
Thanks a lot for the effort, Craig.
> since no-one else has bothered to answer this question, i did it myself. a
> classification of every non-free package that was in my debian mirror. a total
> of 273 packages, but only 259 packages had a 'copyright' file (odd, i thought
> there were more...about 350 or so. we must have got rid of a lot of non-free
> packages).
[...]
> i DID NOT exhaustively analyse each license. i looked quickly at each one to
> try to find out why it had been classified as non-free. in some cases, that
> means i may not have noted down all the reasons why a particular package is
> non-free.
Maybe as a first measure, we could mass-file wishlist bugs against
non-free packages, asking the maintainer to put a small paragraph into
the copyright file with an explanation as to why this is in non-free?
I think that would be helpful at least for future examinations like
this, but could also be used to auto-generate a website with all the
summaries, if this paragraph would be written in a fixed form.
Or is this commonly explained in README.Debian or elsewhere? Craig, did
you see a lot of package where this is perhaps already the case?
Michael
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