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. > > 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?
Notice that some few years back, it was considered not worth it to do such for non-free, saying that the ones who want to distribute/use/whatever non-free should go look trough the copyright file themselves, but i agree with you that this is usefull. And again, sorry for miswriting your name. Friendly, Sven Luther
