Hi, On Thu, 18 Aug 2016, Luke W Faraone wrote: > Microsoft recently released PowerShell as free software, and this month > announced support for Linux platforms. > > From a parausal of the source code, it appears to be suitable for > inclusion in Debian.
I started looking at it but it's not clear that it's suitable for Debian main. I found this in particular: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/blob/master/license_thirdparty_proprietary.txt#L456 So while powershell itself is MIT licensed it also includes other third party software, some of which is even announced to be proprietary. The file starts with: | IMPORTANT NOTICE: THE SOFTWARE ALSO CONTAINS THIRD PARTY AND OTHER | PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE THAT ARE GOVERNED BY SEPARATE LICENSE TERMS And the lines that I pointed out above include some restrictions which probably fall short of our "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" rule. | You may not [...] include Distributable Code in malicious, deceptive or | unlawful programs; or And even more frightening: | You may not [...] publish the software for others to copy; [...] | use the software for commercial software hosting services. In some other parts (Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure) we only have the right to use, not to modify, etc. So I think that powershell can only be packaged for non-free. Unless it can be split into a free part with some non-free bits that can be packaged separately. But even if that is possible, it will likely be a significant amount of work and a pain to maintain over time. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
