[gNewSense-users] Re: APT and licences.

[Chris Andrew]

Michael,

My name is Chris, and I co-ordinate the _Package Freedom Verification (PFV)_ at gNewsense

I have recently joined the _gobuntu_ mailing list, an excerpt of which is shown below.

A common goal that gNewsense (gNS) and gobuntu have, is to strip all non-free software out of the respective distros.

I was wondering, is it possible for APT to extract licence information from package (metadata?), in the future?  This would enable people to easily check all packages to see which licences they were using.

Could you let me know what you think?

Many thanks.

Cheers,

Chris.

On 21/07/07, Zeth Green < address@hidden> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 21, 2007 at 08:24:55PM +0100, Chris Andrew wrote:
> Hi, all.
>
> Over at gNewsense, a great idea was mentioned on the list, or IRC; could
> packages be identified (in the future) using APT, to display the licence
> used?  The idea being that you could select all packages with or without a
> certain licence, and sort accordingly.  This could be a great way for
> example, to find non-GPL'd (or any other licence) packages.
>
> Any thoughts?

Gentoo's portage does include the licence in the metadata, although nothing
much is done with it. It seems like a good idea at least. This is an
upstream APT problem rather than a distribution problem. Perhaps the best
step forward is to track down the APT maintainers to see what can be done.

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