Re: summary of software licenses in non-free
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.
>
> 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?
Notice that some few years back, it was considered not worth it to do
such for non-free, saying that the ones who want to
distribute/use/whatever non-free should go look trough the copyright
file themselves, but i agree with you that this is usefull.
And again, sorry for miswriting your name.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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