[CCing -devel as I am making a technical proposal, see below.] On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 06:57:09PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote: > so, what exactly is in non-free?
Thanks a lot for the effort, Craig. > since no-one else has bothered to answer this question, i did it myself. a > classification of every non-free package that was in my debian mirror. a > total > of 273 packages, but only 259 packages had a 'copyright' file (odd, i thought > there were more...about 350 or so. we must have got rid of a lot of non-free > packages). [...] > i DID NOT exhaustively analyse each license. i looked quickly at each one to > try to find out why it had been classified as non-free. in some cases, that > means i may not have noted down all the reasons why a particular package is > non-free. Maybe as a first measure, we could mass-file wishlist bugs against non-free packages, asking the maintainer to put a small paragraph into the copyright file with an explanation as to why this is in non-free? I think that would be helpful at least for future examinations like this, but could also be used to auto-generate a website with all the summaries, if this paragraph would be written in a fixed form. Or is this commonly explained in README.Debian or elsewhere? Craig, did you see a lot of package where this is perhaps already the case? Michael
