[Nix-dev] Re: Separating Free/non-free package

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

"Sander van der Burg - EWI"
<S.vanderBurg at tudelft.nl> writes:

> I think seperating packages in a "per-policy" composition file is a
> very bad idea. It becomes even more difficult for files like
> python-packages.nix or other expressions that provide their own
> compositions like the KDE 4.3 expression. Should we also provide a
> free-python-packages.nix and a free-kde-packages.nix etc? And what
> about all the redundant code? I think this will make things much more
> difficult.

Good point.  However...

> We should specify for every package a proper license meta attribute
> and use that license attribute to determine whether the component is
> free software, open source software, freely distributable or
> what-ever-class of software you want.

Of course, that’s the first solution I had in mind, but then I thought
it wouldn’t work for the following reasons:

  * Some of us currently don’t care about ‘meta.license’, or don’t want
    to take the time to define it.

  * Sometimes ‘meta.license’ is inaccurate or non-informative (e.g.,
    “license = "free"”).

  * I don’t think Nixpkgs as a project would adopt a policy saying that
    packages aren’t committed unless they have undergone licensing
    review leading to an accurate ‘meta.license’ attribute (which is a
    consequence of the points above.)

Based on this, the only solutions I could think of are:

  1. Use a separate file for free software, which is known to be
     4-freedom-free because it’s been audited.

  2. Use a separate branch.

I’d prefer (1) because it makes it easier to share work among us.

That said, I’m open to other suggestions.

Thanks,
Ludo’.