Re: Some hard numbers on licenses used by elisp packages

[Jonas Bernoulli]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:
>   > > This may be because the
>   > > library lacks a permission statement altogether (possibly because an
>   > > accompanying ~LICENSE~ file is considered sufficient by the upstream),
>
>   > > but it may also be because ~elx-license~ does not attempt to detect the
>   > > used non-standard and/or non-fsf permission statement, or because of
>   > > typos in the statement, or for a number of other reasons.
>
> We need to get a handle on what is really going on for these cases.
> A typo in a license notice, or an unusual license, might not be a real
> problem.  The lack of a clearly stated free license is a real problem,
> and the mere possibility that someone stated a license for it
> in some other site is not enough to make the problem go away.
>
> We need to find out what is going on in those 500 packages.
>
> One useful way to investigate would be to pick 10 of those packages,
> and see what is the situation with each of them.
>
> Would someone please volunteer to do this?

Once you have found someone to do this, s/he should contact me and I
will provide the necessary data and/or help that person get started
using my tools themselve.  Using those tools instead of just relying
on a data dump would actually make the process easier.  But currently
the usage instructions are spread across multiple manual, blog posts,
and repositories, so some guidance by me might be necessary to get
started.

The process could then be something like
1. emacs ~/code/epkg-stats/licenses-extras.org
2. emacs ~/code/emacsmirror/mirror/<package>/<package>.el
3. emacs ~/.emacs.d/lib/elx/elx.el # refine and add regexps
4. M-: (elx-license)               # in <package>.el
   unless satisfied, goto 3
5. M-x emir-recreate-packages      # *
6. C-c C-v C-b                     # in licenses-extras.org
7. M-x magit-diff-unstaged
8. goto 1

* Doesn't actually exist right now, you need to use
  emir-update-packages, with the irrelevant parts
  commented out.  Even then, this takes a few minutes.

  Jonas