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Package: www.debian.org
Severity: important
This is very common question that comes to my mind time after time:
"Is this license called X free according to Debian Free Software
Guidelines"
Every fscking time I try find answer to such question from WWW-pages of
Debian-project, I find it to be outrageously difficult and time-consuming
task:
* * *
There is this page:
http://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/
Just compare your lousy license-list page to this:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
License list page of Debian project has these drawbacks (especially when
compared to gnu.org's corresponding page):
1) You can not navigate to that page easily from front page of
Debian-project; I just somehow stumbled across to that page some day.
Why on earth these pages do not have links pointing to it?:
http://www.debian.org/social_contract
http://www.debian.org/intro/free
http://www.debian.org/sitemap
2) It has very few licenses.
3) It is updated way too slowly.
4) It do not provide references to relevant WWW-pages, documents, papers,
decisions, mailing-list messages etc., where freeness of certain license
is further evaluated.
5) It do not have summaries about freeness of licenses.
6) It do not point out exact versions of licenses that are free or
non-free.
Those were those drawbacks of that page.
Right now that lousy WWW-page do not give exact answers to these questions:
Is GNU GPLv3 DFSG-free?
Which Creative Commons -licenses are DFSG-free and which are not? Which
versions of those Creative Commons -licenses are free and which are not?
Is GNU FDL DFSG-free?
Somehow I have stumbled across this WWW-page:
http://people.debian.org/~evan/ccsummary.html
But it is about CC-licenses of version 2.0, not 3.0.
Then there is this:
http://people.debian.org/~evan/draftresponse.txt
It is about _draft_ of CC-licenses version 3.0, not about _final_
licenses.
* * *
AFAIK ftp-master(s) should not let non-DFSG-free packages to slip to
main-directory of Debian. But I do not consider this reliable way to
find out freeness of some license: This way has these drawbacks:
1) Sometimes aptitude, vrms and other tools show some package in main, when
in reality it is not DFSG-free package at all; It happens all the time with
packages that come from some unofficial apt-get-source. Packages of
debian-multimedia.org are very good example of such packages.
2) First I must find some Debian-package that has exactly the same license
whose DFSG-freeness I am trying to figure out and then check out if it
has gone to main or non-free. But it is almost impossible:
packages.debian.org do not provide searching packages having certain
license. Sometimes Debian do not have any package having same license whose
DFSG-freenes I am trying to figure out.
3) Sometimes some non-free stuff may slip to main.
Those were those drawbacks. I am not very sure about that last one.
Right now Debian has a new package called ttf-konatu and it is in main.
It uses Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Does that
mean CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 is really DFSG-free? What if
ftp-master made a mistake?
* * *
Then there is that mailing-list called debian-legal. You can rest assured
I am not the only one having better things to do than searching
mailing-list archives of debian-legal. If aforementioned license list page
were better maintained, there would be no need to waste time searching
archives of debian-legal .
* * *
I am very often interested in stance of Debian project in license
questions, because those people evaluate licenses very carefully.
Sometimes they find problems that are not found by FSF; GNU FDL is good
example about such license. But when decisions about DFSG-freeness of
license are done, they are not very well reported to outside of
Debian-project.: GNU FDL had its problems from day one, when FSF released
it. But it took way too much time before Debian-project made enough
noise about those problems: First there was discussions in debian-legal
of course. Then something appeared to Debian Weekly News. Then came
this announcement:
http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060316
But aforementioned license list still says nothing about it.
During that slow process people created documents under GNU FDL, because
they did not know about problems of GNU FDL.
Now same thing is happening with CC-licenses: There has been big hype
about those licenses but Debian project has been too quiet about problems
of those licenses. Meanwhile people have created non-free content, because
they think CC-licenses are |<00|_ and nobody have told them there are
non-free licenses in CC-licenses.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (1100, 'testing'), (990, 'stable'), (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (500, 'proposed-updates'), (101, 'testing'), (99, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-1-k7 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=fi_FI.utf8, LC_CTYPE=fi_FI.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
--
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen * http colon slash slash iki dot fi slash juhtolv
"Sou sa, ima mo ore wa mitsukerarenai sonzai no imi ga, dakara motto motto
motto motto motto kono karada ni imi wo kizamitsukeru: 'Tada waratte,
fuminijireba ii.'" Dir en grey
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