On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 10:26:28AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> [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.
Thanks both.
Without wishing to (re)start the separate docs aren't software thread
from a couple of months back when we were discussing the DFSG :)
Could the Project rename non-free to non-DFSG-free to
re-emphasise the fundamental reason why it's there?
Can we split the non-free archive? A section saying non-mod-docs
might be useful to take the W3C docs and the GFDL stuff, at least.
[For the W3C docs, for example, there is no reason except convenience
why they would _have_ to be served from .debian.org - could we get them
to host the .debs of their own documentation? ]
Just my 0.02c
Andy
