Re: summary of software licenses in non-free
On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 11:43:28AM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 10:26:28AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > [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.
> Thanks both.
>
> Without wishing to (re)start the separate docs aren't software thread
> from a couple of months back when we were discussing the DFSG :)
>
> Could the Project rename non-free to non-DFSG-free to
> re-emphasise the fundamental reason why it's there?
>
> Can we split the non-free archive? A section saying non-mod-docs
> might be useful to take the W3C docs and the GFDL stuff, at least.
>
> [For the W3C docs, for example, there is no reason except convenience
> why they would _have_ to be served from .debian.org - could we get them
> to host the .debs of their own documentation? ]
The problem with third party servers, is for how long they will be able
to make a commitment, and how will the end user know that this is the
right place for searching them, and be sure he can trust a random
apt-source he place in his list.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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