[Debtags-devel] "license" facet?

[Enrico Zini]

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On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 08:49:26PM -0400, Mike Paul wrote:

> We have uitoolkit::gtk for the latter case, but what about selecting
> based on license?  That seems like a good idea.  Maybe license::gpl,
> license::bsd, etc.  We can create tags for all the well-known licenses,
> and software using an unusual license would be tagged as "other", or
> maybe just not tagged at all.
[..]
> Being new here, though, I hope I'm not implying a big new burden of work
> by suggesting another facet.  :-)

I like the idea.  I see two things that need a bit of thinking:

 1) There are many packages with a free, but not-so-standard license
    (such as flex, python, w3m, debconf and many others[1])
    categorise those packages with a non-standard license.

    This calls for an 'other' category, which I generally dislike.
    Also, quite a lot of packages would end up in the 'other' category.

    Or, we could have tags such as "Something else, but DFSG-Free" or
    "Fails DFSG point 2".

 2) I don't know if this risk is real; however, people could see the tag
    and don't go further reading the license.  Since this is legal
    business, one can infringe the law because the tag is wrong, then
    blame us.  And currently, everyone can go to the packagebrowser
    website and tag packages however they want.
   =20
However, I'd like to find software by license, so I don't want to
dismiss the idea, but to go deeper into it.

Some options that come to my mind:

 - Make some tags read-only in the packagebrowser (its sources are in
   svn://svn.debian.org/debtags/central-database/trunk and we can help
   Erich with some patches).
   We need ways of updating the data, though: maybe restrict writing to
   patches sent my a mail signed by a DD?  I could implement sending
   signed mails in debtags and debtags-edit, if needed.
  =20
   This feature would be helpful for other cases, such as CDD-specific
   facets where you only want the CDD people to change the data.  But it
   might be a while until it's implemented.

 - Only tag those packages that have a license among those in
   /usr/share/common-licenses, unchanged.  That would give us some
   useful data for a number of packages, and would allow us to look for
   software under the most famous license.

We can start working on a set of tags and see how it goes.  I can boot
the process with /usr/share/common-licenses/:

   License::Artistic
   License::BSD
   License::GPL
   License::GPL-2
   License::LGPL
   License::LGPL-2
   License::LGPL-2.1

or:

   License::Artistic
   License::BSD
   License::GPL
   License::LGPL

or:

   License::Artistic
   License::BSD
   License::GPL-2
   License::LGPL-2
   License::LGPL-2.1

Which one is best?

Also, should we involve debian-legal@lists.debian.org in the discussion?


Ciao,

Enrico

[1] You can find many many more by doing a:
    find /usr/share/doc/ -name copyright -maxdepth 2 | xargs grep -L "GNU G=
eneral\|GPL\|BSD" | less
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>

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