There are differences betwen the [Debian Free Software Guidelines](http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines) (DFSG) and [Free Software](http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) as defined by the Free Software Foundation. The FSF's GNU project is the sponsor of the GNU/Hurd project. Debian GNU/Hurd is a "port" or distribution of this software. I have not yet performed a comparison between the list of acceptable DFSG licenses (if a list exists) and the acceptable Free Software [license list](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html). (Not directly related but for reference, her's the Open Source [license list](http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html)) The packages marked "Essential" should be checked for the type of license they use.

What will this consist of? In the end the result will need to be simply a list of packages with their license marked next to them. This will be relatively simple for those packages that use a standard license. Software that has it's own custom license will need to be categorized.

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 of packages. This is possible by parsing /var/lib/dpkg/available, using dpkg or using apt-cache.

The next step is checking the licenses of the packages. There is no dpkg package field available for license. A script that checks licenses will involve using "apt-get source" to check the COPYING and/or similar files in each package.

-- [[Main/GrantBow]] - 5 Oct 2002