Because of the difference betwen the DFSG and "Free Software" the packages marked "Essential" should be checked for the type of license they use.

What will this consist of? At a basic level it will need to be simply a list of packages with their license marked next to them.

I am thinking of ways to automatically check the licenses and to get lists of the various "Priority:" packages. I thought this list of package names would be easy to obtain. The first step is getting the list by parsing /var/lib/dpkg/available, using dpkg or using apt-cache.

There is no dpkg package field available for license. Then a script to check licenses will involve using "apt-get source" to check the COPYING and/oror similar files in each package.

-- [[Main/GrantBow]] - 4 Oct 2002