Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Thu, 07 Jan 2021, Richard Stallman wrote:

> I see two ways we could possibly manage to use repology.org in the
> Free World.

> * Find a way to distinguish free from nonfree packages.  I see two
> ideas One is to snarf the lists of free packages from Debian and
> Parabola.  Another is to see if free packages list a license that
> shows they are free.  You might have other ideas.

> * Ask the developer of repology.org to work with us to indicate which
> packages are free, maybe even provide a way to specify "show me only
> free packages".

One would first have to define what qualifies as a free package, and the
world isn't all black-or-white there.

For example, the tarball of org-mode as released by upstream [1]
contains Relax-NG schemas [2] distributed under a license that doesn't
allow modification. Does that make org-mode a non-free package?

The way we handle this in Gentoo is not to install these non-free
components by default. Users however have the option to enable their
installation if they do two things: a) set a so-called USE flag, and
b) explicitly accept these components' license.

Another example is the intlfonts package [3], which contains some
Tibetan fonts with a non-commercial restriction. Again, Gentoo handles
this with a USE flag, so users have to explicitly ask for installation
of these non-free fonts.

There are many more packages like that, and I don't believe that one
could simply divide them into free and non-free by just taking the
package name. It will depend on what the distro does when installing
them or creating a binary package from them.

[1] https://orgmode.org/org-9.4.tar.gz
[2] in directory etc/schema/
[3] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Intlfonts