[packagekit] Free and non-free filter

[Richard Hughes]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 14:53 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
> I've Cc'ed Tom Callaway, He's effectively The Fedora Licensing guy, and
> might have some input.

Cool, thanks. I think licencing is very important, well, much more
important that agreeing to random EULA's.

> 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.

Yes, please commit ;-)

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

No, I don't want to convey the difference to the users. Free is easy to
comprehend.

> 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.

No, I think we have to whitelist, not blacklist. i.e. if a package has
no licence field then it's non-free - it's only free if the licence
explicitly says so.

> 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. :-)

Heh, indeed :-)

Richard.