Re: [gNewSense-users] Freedom verification (checking packages)

[Daniel Taylor]

Paul O'Malley wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Perhaps you should take a break from it - and dissect the data you now
> have. Then look at designing a method for tackling the packages.
> Most of this is down to pattern matching, with some output.
> If you write the rules "very exactly" about how you want to find things
> maybe someone might feel like scripting it. But it would help you work
> out what is in stuff.
>
> Note that BSD has more than one licence, and as I understand it the
> later one is considered a free licence, and not conflicting with the
> GPL. (As usual I am open to correction.)
>
> It might be of use to team up in the channel and then form a sub channel
>  with our blessing to discuss this to firm up a proposal that might work
> as an algorithm.
>
> (Just another idea.)
>
> Regards,
>
> Paul

I think this is a good idea, when I was doing the 20 or so that I've 
done I used a mixture of searching on freshmeat.net, which tells you 
what licence a package is using and then looking at the copyright 
file[1] which generally tells you the true story, unfortunately no one 
seems to have some up with a standard way to display this data in the 
copyright file, so it could be tricky.

This issue becomes more complicated when you look at the apt copyright 
file[2] which talk about a licence it *used* to be licensed under ("Qt 
Free Edition License"), so simply searching for keywords in these files 
might provide false positives/negatives.

I certainly think the process needs to be more automated, most of the 
work I had to do was finding the package, since it seems the change logs 
site[1] is well laid out we could probably do something like dropping 
all the packages names into a SQL table and have a script print out a 
form on demand saying "Check package 'apt' version '0.6.46.3' ... click 
here for copyright file .... click here for freshmeat.net page..." and 
allow who ever wants to get involved to 'tag' a package with a licence.

Sound good?

- Daniel

[1] which can be found at changelogs.ubuntu.com for every pacakge.
[2]http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/a/apt/apt_0.6.46.3ubuntu1/apt.copyright