Re: [gNewSense-users] this is not the blob you are expecting

[ben]

As far as I understand, it is the kind of thing we did for the amslatex
package?
Then that's a big project.
We could try with a few examples before attacking this as a whole? Like,
choose some package / file that is currently removed from gNS, contact
the copyright owner and see what happens?
Just to get the requirements of this project right?

As an example, gNS removes tg3. Should we try to contact Broadcom?

ben

> 
> This sort of "license compliance lab" has been on my
> think-about-this-some-more list for a long time. I was actually talking
> to Marco Chieppa about something like this yesterday on #gnewsense-dev,
> in relation to bug 345 [1]. There are patches that we get for free from
> Debian, but if we'd make our own package we'd have to remember freedom
> problems.
> 
> The free distro compliance team would work (in cooperation with the FSF
> compliance team) on the issues we encounter in practice. Linux is a
> special case because it's so big and we remove a lot from it. So I
> thought it would be nice to have an 'inside man' on it to nudge
> contributors in the right direction (going from proper copyright
> statements to saying no to blobs). Maybe Alexandre Oliva already does
> this to some extent. For packages that have an 'inconvenient' license
> (e.g. Artistic) the copyright holder (who sometimes doesn't that much)
> could be asked to change it.
> 
> As I said, I haven't thought this through yet, this is just a braindump.
> If anyone wants to take this on I suggest either starting out with a new
> project for the freedom verification team [2] or (as Paul said)
> contacting the GNU/Linux Libre mailing list. I suspect this to be a
> rather challenging task.
> 
> [1] http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00345
> [2] http://wiki.gnewsense.org/VerificationTeam/VerificationTeam
> 
> 
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