Re: [gNewSense-users] What sucks about gNewSense?

[Kevin Dean]

On Nov 12, 2007 3:38 PM, Brian Brazil <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Nov 12, 2007 7:59 PM, Kevin Dean <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I was referring to that liblicense, yes. I do understand, however,
> > that it isn't an end-all solution to the problem. I only used it to
> > illustrate a possible solution and give an example of a tool that does
> > something similar to what I envision. It could, in theory, be expanded
> > to handle a myriad of licenses on a file-by-file basis.
>
> Fundamentally, I don't believe a technical solution will help to resolve
> what is essentially a legal and social issue. While it would be nice to have
> an automated tool to verify licenses, the area as a whole has a large number
> of people with greatly differing visions of what freedom is and isn't.

That's a damn good point, actually. And that point made me think of
something else too... Liblicense is useless because it can't say "this
is Free" and "this is not".

What's important is that the information is in one place so that
people can make that decision on their own. That said, are there any
ways that we can best organize this information? While I think the PFV
work that's been done is AWESOME it's very hard to actually utilize
(IMO) and will be ESPECIALLY hard to scale when future version of
gNewSense are released.

Has anyone seen Debian's revised package search tool?
http://packages.debian.org/sid/xserver-xorg

>Add in
> things like detecting non-free items embedded in otherwise free code
> and you've got something that is, at best, a very meaty research project.
>
> I would hope that others can build on our PFV work, as once we've gone
> through everything once subsequent changes are easier to deal with.