Package: debian-policy Severity: wishlist Inspired by bug 689095, I'd like to suggest something like the following as an addition to Debian Policy:
===== Software in Debian should not prompt users to explicitly agree to licenses, disclaimers, or terms of service in order to run that software. This includes prompts to agree to Free Sofware licenses (since such licenses do not require user agreement), warranty or liability disclaimers, notices about possible legal issues, or exhortations to use the software in any particular way. Software designed to interact with a third-party service may pass through the terms of service for that third-party service if required by that service. ===== The DFSG already prohibits click-through licenses, and likely terms of service if they actually constitute a license; I only mentioned them here for completeness. This policy change would cover disclaimers, warnings about local laws, or similar. Also, I intentionally only covered the case of prompting for agreement, rather than simply displaying; plenty of software displays disclaimers or similar at startup (for instance, gdb), but requiring user agreement seems like the case worth prohibiting. I didn't bother saying anything about software in non-free, since such software may unavoidably have to prompt the user for agreement if the license requires it, or if the license prohibits the modifications necessary to remove it; I figured that limiting it to "Software in Debian" (relying on the standard definition of non-free as not part of Debian) would suffice for the cases I care about. To the best of my knowledge, almost no software in Debian currently does this, so this change would not make packages immediately buggy. I intentionally made this a "should" rather than a "must" for now, because I know of one package that already does this, and I don't intend for this change to make any package immediately rc-buggy. The one package I know of that does this, Transmission, I've already filed a bug on (bug 689095). - Josh Triplett -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121014215021.12090.23826.reportbug@leaf
