[packagekit] Free and non-free filter

[Robin Norwood]

Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> writes:

> For the soon to be discussed EULA licence stuff, I want to add another
> filter; "free" and "~free" based on the package licence.
>
> For example, I could do "SearchDescription available;free
> virtualisation" to get all the packages I could install for
> non-proprietary solutions. I guess we can just whitelist the GPL, GPLv2,
> GPLv2+ type strings for this and keep it nicely simple.
>
> Of course, "free" can take all the usually debates on it's meaning, but
> I take "free" to mean "FSF declared this licence as free" rather than
> "this costs nothing".
>
> The GPLv2+ matching should probably be shared somewhere in a nice
> boolean=pk_backend_license_is_free(string) matching function. We can use
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing as an initial reference, as I
> guess most of the other backends will have similar short names.
>
> So, I guess this feature is useful (it's useful to me, just so I install
> the correct free flash package). I'm guessing it's mostly trivial to get
> this information from the metadata, and so wouldn't be too hard to add.
> Correct me if I'm wrong. Comments?

I've Cc'ed Tom Callaway, He's effectively The Fedora Licensing guy, and
might have some input.

Personally, I love this idea.  Fedora, at least, has been making lots of
progress with validating and regularizing the License field for our
rpms, through lots of work from the aforementioned Mr. Callaway.  I
think Fedora is in pretty good shape right now - I don't know about
other distributions, or other 'fedora compatible' repositories, though.

If we're using the FSF definition of Free, I guess this is the
definitive page:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/

We should probably reference that somewhere in the docs/help.

Do we care about flagging 'open source' too?
(http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical, for instance)

Also, from a practical point of view, would we mark anything that
doesn't match the list of Free licenses as 'non free'?  This seems the
only way to do it, but will lead to false positives.

Hey, it will also make a great tool to help audit package licensing...it
would be great to search for 'non-free' in Fedora and get...nothing. :-)

-RN

-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

"The Sage does nothing, yet nothing remains undone."
-Lao Tzu, Te Tao Ching