[gNewSense-users] Re: APT and licences.

[Chris Andrew]

Justin,

Having reviewed many licences in gNewsense, I know that the majority are GPL, but I take your point.  

At least we could perhaps aim for a query using APT/ dpkg etc, such as _all packages that aren't licenced under GPL_.

This would greatly reduce the amount of checking.  It's difficult to do at the moment, as it is hard to script (due to the different licence data formats), but if it was part of a packaging structure in the future, then that should at least reduce the work load.

For example, if APT/ dpkg produced a list of all packages available to a distro, that were not GPL, then this could reduce the number of packages to be checked, by 80%.

Does that make sense?

Thanks,

Chris.

On 21/07/07, Justin Dugger <address@hidden> wrote:

Whatever path you choose, keep in mind that there's nearly as many
licenses as there are programs.  Many projects allow exemptions for
OpenSSL.  Some projects have different code files under different
licenses.  If the use case is to make gnewsense / gobuntu easier to
create, these exemptions make the process far more difficult.

Also, I think you mean dpkg / .deb rather than APT.  APT is a tool to
aggregate .debs over a variety of sources.  It should be trivial to
add a section to the .deb format, but defining what exactly you need
may be non-trivial.

Justin Dugger


On 7/21/07, Zeth Green <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 08:24:55PM +0100, Chris Andrew wrote:
> > Hi, all.
> >
> > Over at gNewsense, a great idea was mentioned on the list, or IRC; could
> > packages be identified (in the future) using APT, to display the licence
> > used?  The idea being that you could select all packages with or without a
> > certain licence, and sort accordingly.  This could be a great way for
> > example, to find non-GPL'd (or any other licence) packages.
> >
> > Any thoughts?
>
> Gentoo's portage does include the licence in the metadata, although nothing
> much is done with it. It seems like a good idea at least. This is an
> upstream APT problem rather than a distribution problem. Perhaps the best
> step forward is to track down the APT maintainers to see what can be done.
>
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