Re: PPA licenses

["Celso Providelo" <celso.providelo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/23/07, Matthew Revell <matthew.revell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
>
> Matthew East wrote:
>
> > Just starting to read the PPAQuickStart wiki page, I discovered that
> > both on that page and in the PPA terms of service, it's necessary for
> > one of the licenses listed on http://opensource.org/licenses/category
> > to apply to the package.
> >
> > What is the position for packages which contain material which is
> > distributed under licenses which aren't in that list but which are
> > still free?
>
> [...]
>
> > Can anyone clarify?
>
> Thank you for the question. I shall raise this in today's Launchpad
> developer meeting and get an answer for you.

Hi Matthew(s),

I didn't attend the devel-meeting today. How was the discussion ?

On Ubuntu, we rely on archive-admins reviews (during queue NEW time)
to ensure source licences still coping with Ubuntu-Policy.

Beforehand, I can say that ensuring (automatically reviewing) sources
licence is as much *blue-sky* as it is wanted in Soyuz.

We gave a significant step during 1.1.8, storing the source
'copyright' (debian/copyright in deb packages) text in a separated
field in DB, so it can be easily exposed via UI and it is potentially
searchable/scanned.

Nonetheless, it is still requiring a large amount of
human-interpretation to find out the respective binary licence
(specially when we have mixed licences, LGPL + GPL is commonest case).

Whatever algorithm we choose to restrict source upload to a
established set of licences, it might not work very well. This
situation suggests that we would be better providing a UI mechanism
for something like "licence-review-nomination". It sounds HR-wise
expensive, but it could be easily delegated to the community.

What do you think ?

[]
-- 
Celso Providelo <celso.providelo@xxxxxxxxx>