> Why not have a Legal: or License: field that specifies the license(s)
> the package adheres to? This does not impact dpkg/apt in any way (as I
Most of the software in main is under a fairly small set of licenses,
but almost every package in non-free has its own individual reason for being
there. In many cases non-free packages have some clause which says
"You can distribute this as you like, and use it internally within a
company, but if you want to charge other people to use it you must contact
the author" - phrased in various ways.
Each of these will need its own License: field.
> have proposed. This also saves package maintainers of keeping track of
> legal issues that may not be necessary anyway. You could then have a
non-free is essentially a place where anything which has an uncertain
license is placed - it is up to the person wanting to use, or sell the
software to check, package by package, that they can do so legally - the
package maintainer can not be expected to know every possible
> If you would enforce a certain license-policy, I suppose dpkg could be
> changed as well, to prevent temptation to install things by hand, with a
> --force-legal to override.
>
> You could even get rid of non-free this way. Or am I being too ambitious
> here ?
Yes
John Lines
