Licenses in Arch

gummibaerchen · 2007-07-29 11:57:23

Hi,

As I care much about Free Software I wanted to find out, how much unfree software I use with arch.

I hacked up some scripts that show me which licences I use mostly, etc., but I found out that most packages most lack the license description.

I have 673 packages installed, and here are the licenses used:

350 None
203 GPL
113 LGPL
26 custom
7 BSD
5 MPL
2 APACHE
2 MIT
1 GPL2
1 CCPL-Attribution-ShareAlike-2.5
1 zlib
1 custom:none
1 custom:ISC
1 LPGL
1 lgpl
1 ASL-1.1
1 CUSTOUM
1 X11
1 GFDL
1 cracklib

I was a little bit confused, why there are so many packages without any licence specified.

I think this should be fixed ASAP, especially to create a good basis for this: http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6510

btw, all my packages (except two) are from current or testing!

Regards

PS: I will post my scripts very soonish, they just need some more clean-ups.

Last edited by gummibaerchen (2007-07-29 12:06:01)

retsaw · 2007-07-29 12:22:42

I did mention this in the "repo reorganization" thread a little while ago, since someone mentioned using the License field since someone mentioned using the license field as an alternative to a non-free repository, so I thought I'd check the viability of it. No one responded to it then, I'm not particuarly bothered by this so I didn't follow it up with a bug report, but it should really be fixed.

My result the was 462 out of 696 packages without a licence entry. My current result is 455 out of 718 without a licence entry. Which looks like a slight improvement.

I didn't even bother with a complete script to get my results I just used a long command with lots of pipes. Here is my full list

455 None
149 GPL
35 LGPL
25 custom
14 BSD
11 GPL LGPL
5 GPL custom
3 LGPL MPL
3 APACHE
2 MPL GPL
2 LGPL GPL
2 lgpl
2 GPL2
2 custom
1 ZLIB
1 zlib
1 PHP
1 MPL GPL LGPL
1 MIT
1 GPL LGPL MIT
1 CUSTOUM
1 cracklib

The command to get total packages installed

pacman -Qi | wc -l

And the command to get the licence counts

pacman -Q | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs pacman -Qi | grep Licence | cut -d\: -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr

dolby · 2007-07-29 12:24:32

i might be mistaking, but i think that most of those packages have been built a long time ago, when i guess the lisence array wasnt part of pkgbuilds.
& since there were no updates they havent been built lately again

btw the command to get the licence counts returns nothing here

Last edited by dolby (2007-07-29 12:27:24)

gummibaerchen · 2007-07-29 12:33:54

Hi retsaw,

I see that this is really a problem and therefore the next script I will write will list packages with a particular license (most interesting: None).

But how should this be handled? Should all people who find missing licenses write to the maintainer or would a post on some mailinglist be enough?

btw: my "scripts" aren't that big, but a little bit longer than yours, as I am not the best in bash programming...

---

in order to get your script working some may have to change from "Licence" (British English) to "License" (American English).

Seems like pacman is localized

$ pacman -Q | cut -d" " -f1 | xargs pacman -Qi | grep License | cut -d\: -f2 | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr

Last edited by gummibaerchen (2007-07-29 12:36:11)

nikron · 2007-07-29 15:26:24

229 License : None
132 License : GPL
34 License : LGPL
23 License : custom
12 License : GPL LGPL
4 License : BSD
3 License : GPL custom
2 License : MPL GPL
2 License : LGPL MPL
2 License : LGPL GPL
1 License : zlib
1 License : vim
1 License : unknown
1 License : selflicensed
1 License : lgpl
1 License : custom:none
1 License : custom:ISC
1 License : custom:GPL
1 License : cracklib
1 License : MPL GPL LGPL
1 License : MIT
1 License : ICU License
1 License : GPL2
1 License : GPL-2
1 License : GPL LGPL MPL
1 License : GPL LGPL MIT
1 License : CUSTOUM
1 License : ASL-1.1 X11

Well I get similar results. I wonder who put CUSTOUM as the license

ezzetabi · 2007-07-29 17:01:46

(not for a flame wars, just plain curiosity)
Why do you care?

Roberth · 2007-07-29 17:04:52

191 None
73 GPL
24 LGPL
14 custom
8 GPL LGPL
4 BSD
3 GPL custom
2 MPL GPL
2 LGPL MPL
1 zlib
1 lgpl
1 custom
1 cracklib
1 MPL GPL LGPL
1 LPGL
1 LGPL GPL
1 GPL2
1 GPL LGPL MIT
1 CCPL-Attribution-ShareAlike-2.5

Yeah I agree, there should be a cleanup on this.

shining · 2007-07-29 20:43:51

nikron wrote:

Well I get similar results. I wonder who put CUSTOUM as the license

grep -r CUSTOUM /var/lib/pacman/local
/var/lib/pacman/local/vim-7.1.12-1/desc:CUSTOUM

maybe?

gummibaerchen · 2007-07-30 13:57:30

shining wrote:

nikron wrote:
Well I get similar results. I wonder who put CUSTOUM as the license
grep -r CUSTOUM /var/lib/pacman/local
/var/lib/pacman/local/vim-7.1.12-1/desc:CUSTOUM
maybe?

yeah, Vim has that as license:

$ pacman -Qi vim | grep Licen
License        : CUSTOUM

ezzetabi wrote:

(not for a flame wars, just plain curiosity)
Why do you care?

Because in future pacman will have an option to just install packages which have a certain license and therefore we must have all the licenses right!

I think there should be mails to all maintainer in order to make them set the license right.
Otherwise the new function won't have any use for anyone

Cerebral · 2007-07-30 14:08:47

Someone has been emailing us, I think - at least, this weekend I got an email about one of my packages' licenses (that had already been fixed in CVS but not rebuilt) from someone who said they were checking a bunch of them

Regardless, this has been bugging me for a while. Sometime in the near future I might do a raid of [extra] to add/fix license tags all over the place.

gummibaerchen · 2007-07-30 14:41:11

Cerebral wrote:

Someone has been emailing us, I think - at least, this weekend I got an email about one of my packages' licenses (that had already been fixed in CVS but not rebuilt) from someone who said they were checking a bunch of them

That was me.

Cerebral wrote:

Regardless, this has been bugging me for a while. Sometime in the near future I might do a raid of [extra] to add/fix license tags all over the place.

Do you have already scripts in place to this? Because I was going to write something to find packages without any license, but I you already have such scripts there would not be much sense in it...

BTW: Is it important to have quotation marks around the license?
Sometimes I saw things like this:

license=(CUSTOM)

But in the Packaging Standards[1] it states to have it like this

license=('GPL')

Maybe we can have this fixed as well, if it is important, as it wouldn't be much extra work.. But maybe I just split hairs.

[1] http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arc … _Standards

Cerebral · 2007-07-30 14:59:19

gummibaerchen wrote:

That was me.

Aha!

gummibaerchen wrote:

Do you have already scripts in place to this? Because I was going to write something to find packages without any license, but I you already have such scripts there would not be much sense in it...

Hm... I don't know of any scripts that officially do this, however I have a script I wrote a while back to check dependencies that I could easily modify to check the licenses instead. In fact, I should probably submit these to the dev mailing list to help others out.

gummibaerchen wrote:

BTW: Is it important to have quotation marks around the license?

Nope, it's more of a stylistic thing - I prefer them, but they're not necessary.

ezzetabi · 2007-07-30 15:10:45

In the PKGBUILD the marks are the usual meaning they have in bash scripts?
i.e., ' disables all special meaning of characters
" disables special meaning of many characters (notably does not disable the meaning of $)
If it is so, why putting marks around the licences? It is just for having only one style when : appears?

Cerebral · 2007-07-30 15:21:54

Indeed they are the usual bash-script meaning. Like I said, for most cases (GPL, LGPL, etc...) it's just a stylistic choice - I prefer it, think it's more consistent and clear, but that's just my opinion

pjeremy · 2007-07-30 17:05:48

What's the difference between custom and custom?

 
    339  None
    127  GPL
     40  LGPL (++)
     31  custom  <-- ???
     10  GPL  LGPL (*)
      6  custom  <-- ???
      6  GPL  custom
      4  BSD
      3  LGPL  MPL
      3  APACHE
      2  MPL  GPL
      2  LGPL  GPL  (*)
      1  zlib (+)
      1  lgpl (++)
      1  cracklib
      1  ZLIB (+)
      1  MPL  GPL  LGPL  (**)
      1  MIT
      1  LPGL  (shouldn't this be lgpl?)
      1  ICU License
      1  GPL  LGPL  MPL  (**)
      1  GPL  LGPL  MIT   
      1  CUSTOUM (custoum indeed)

Regarding (*) and (**), licenses should be in alphabetical order.
Regarding (+) and (++), capitalisation should be the norm.

Cerebral · 2007-07-30 17:13:16

pjeremy wrote:

What's the difference between custom and custom?

Perhaps a whitespace issue?

pjeremy wrote:

1 LPGL (shouldn't this be lgpl?)

Yes.

pjeremy wrote:

1 CUSTOUM (custoum indeed)

Indeed, needs to be fixed.

pjeremy wrote:

Regarding (*) and (**), licenses should be in alphabetical order.

Is that really necessary? Seems an awfully arbitrary decision to enforce. I suppose pacman could ensure order, but it's fluff.

pjeremy wrote:

Regarding (+) and (++), capitalisation should be the norm.

The "norm" should be whatever the directory structure is inside /usr/share/licenses. That happens to be capitalized, so in this case I agree with you.

ezzetabi · 2007-07-30 18:46:18

@gummibaerchen
So if the program you need for doing your job have a licence you do not like you will reprogram it from scratch? LOL
Joking a part, I understood.

Cerebral wrote:

Is that really necessary? Seems an awfully arbitrary decision to enforce. I suppose pacman could ensure order, but it's fluff.

If you do not you may have that

MPL  GPL  LGPL 
LGPL MPL  GPL   
GPL  LGPL MPL

are three different licences...

Last edited by ezzetabi (2007-07-30 18:52:52)

Cerebral · 2007-07-30 19:34:45

ezzetabi wrote:

Cerebral wrote:
Is that really necessary? Seems an awfully arbitrary decision to enforce. I suppose pacman could ensure order, but it's fluff.
If you do not you may have that
MPL  GPL  LGPL 
LGPL MPL  GPL   
GPL  LGPL MPL
are three different licences...

No, those are three lists of three licenses each. They don't combine to become one license - that's just an issue in the quick sed script that was put together to list all these licenses. It's just an aesthetic issue, no more.

ezzetabi · 2007-07-31 08:57:14

I see, and what about customs licences? It may means anything from 'just send me a postcard if you wish' to 'if you read this you have to buy my software',,,

How the licences filter can manage that?

gummibaerchen · 2007-07-31 11:14:28

ezzetabi wrote:

I see, and what about customs licences? It may means anything from 'just send me a postcard if you wish' to 'if you read this you have to buy my software',,,
How the licences filter can manage that?

I think most people who use that filter will filter for Free/GPL compatible licenses and therefore custom is not an option for them.

Really custom licenses are hard to specify. But are there many projects using a modified GPL/BSD/MIT/whatever as their _only_ license?

For example Vim, which has a custom license, has a GPL compatible license, so maybe we need some way to define that.

wolfi · 2007-07-31 13:34:21

Do we really need this "feature" ?
Imho its against the KISS principle and the arch philosophy, only fullfilling the wishes of some fuddy-duddy geeks.
Arch never needed that and will never ever need that, the users want just the packages, and dont care about the rest. (dealing with licenses, non-free repo etc)
Same goes for the non-free repo stuff discussed before.

The effort from the Devs needed for these things would be more useful for something else (something that matters) imho

gummibaerchen · 2007-07-31 14:19:20

wolfi wrote:

Do we really need this "feature" ?
Imho its against the KISS principle and the arch philosophy, only fullfilling the wishes of some fuddy-duddy geeks.
Arch never needed that and will never ever need that, the users want just the packages, and dont care about the rest. (dealing with licenses, non-free repo etc)
Same goes for the non-free repo stuff discussed before.
The effort from the Devs needed for these things would be more useful for something else (something that matters) imho

I think the filter is a nice idea and is much easier/simpler than what others do.
And the effort to implement that feature doesn't seem to be such big.

Coming to have the right license in the PKGBUILD: If there is such a field it should be filled out correctly IMHO.

Ursa Major · 2007-07-31 16:11:12

ezzetabi wrote:

(not for a flame wars, just plain curiosity)
Why do you care?

Some of the licences (GPL...) require a copy of the licence text to be distributed with the software. I don't think it applies to the PKGBUILDs in AUR (since Arch is only distributing a recipe that enables the user to download the software itself from another distributor). But for the binary packages, not setting the licence field is, as far as I can see, a breach of the licence. Arch Linux could potentially get into trouble.

Of course, I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not sure.

By the way, currently makepkg refuses to build a package that doesn't specify an arch. Possibly this could be applied to licence field too?

ezzetabi · 2007-07-31 17:56:09

I was thinking about a real example. apsfilter is (GPL custom:postware), I do not think Klemm actually becomes angry if you do not send the post card to him... Yet, it is not a true pure GPL. It would be excluded?

shining · 2007-07-31 19:05:10

wolfi wrote:

Do we really need this "feature" ?
Imho its against the KISS principle and the arch philosophy, only fullfilling the wishes of some fuddy-duddy geeks.
Arch never needed that and will never ever need that, the users want just the packages, and dont care about the rest. (dealing with licenses, non-free repo etc)
Same goes for the non-free repo stuff discussed before.
The effort from the Devs needed for these things would be more useful for something else (something that matters) imho

I found this mail interesting :
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch … 01187.html

Arch Linux

#1 2007-07-29 11:57:23

Licenses in Arch

#2 2007-07-29 12:22:42

Re: Licenses in Arch

#3 2007-07-29 12:24:32

Re: Licenses in Arch

#4 2007-07-29 12:33:54

Re: Licenses in Arch

#5 2007-07-29 15:26:24

Re: Licenses in Arch

#6 2007-07-29 17:01:46

Re: Licenses in Arch

#7 2007-07-29 17:04:52

Re: Licenses in Arch

#8 2007-07-29 20:43:51

Re: Licenses in Arch

#9 2007-07-30 13:57:30

Re: Licenses in Arch

#10 2007-07-30 14:08:47

Re: Licenses in Arch

#11 2007-07-30 14:41:11

Re: Licenses in Arch

#12 2007-07-30 14:59:19

Re: Licenses in Arch

#13 2007-07-30 15:10:45

Re: Licenses in Arch

#14 2007-07-30 15:21:54

Re: Licenses in Arch

#15 2007-07-30 17:05:48

Re: Licenses in Arch

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Re: Licenses in Arch

#17 2007-07-30 18:46:18

Re: Licenses in Arch

#18 2007-07-30 19:34:45

Re: Licenses in Arch

#19 2007-07-31 08:57:14

Re: Licenses in Arch

#20 2007-07-31 11:14:28

Re: Licenses in Arch

#21 2007-07-31 13:34:21

Re: Licenses in Arch

#22 2007-07-31 14:19:20

Re: Licenses in Arch

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Re: Licenses in Arch

#24 2007-07-31 17:56:09

Re: Licenses in Arch

#25 2007-07-31 19:05:10

Re: Licenses in Arch

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