[packagekit] Free and non-free filter

[Robin Norwood]

Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> writes:

> 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 ;-)

Alrighty.  Do you want to consider the Fedora license list page
'canonical' for the license tags, or do you want to maintain a separate
list?

With the Fedora page, other distros would have to use our tags, which
they probably won't want to do.  Maintaining our own list would be a
huge PITA though.

Also, at least in Fedora, dual-licensing syntax is allowed.  For
instance, the License field for perl is:

(GPL+ or Artistic) and (GPLv2+ or Artistic)

I blame the lawyers.  Well, and Spot, but mostly the lawyers. :-)

How do you propose we deal with beasts like the above?  FWIW, the
associated comment reads:

# Modules Tie::File and Getopt::Long are licenced under "GPLv2+ or Artistic,"
# we have to reflect that in the sub-package containing them.
# FIXME: Digest::MD5 has a must-advertise-RSA license with an exception,
# the tag does not reflect that (yet).

So, in this case, I'm not entirely sure why the entire package doesn't
count as 'GPLv2+ or Artistic', since that's the most specific license
that covers the whole package...not counting the Digest::MD5 stuff.

Fwiw, I don't think the License field for Fedora packages is fully
intended to be machine parsable, *but* it is pretty regular, so we can
probably get 95% of the way there.

Isn't licensing fun?

-RN

>> 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.
>
>
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-- 
Robin Norwood
Red Hat, Inc.

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