[Trisquel-devel] Artistic License 1.0 and other licenses

[Rubén Rodríguez Pérez]

> I was wondering: Do the Trisquel project considers the Artistic
> License 1.0  as a Free Software license?. It is considered as a FS
> license by the OSI and Debian but not the FSF. Personally I prefer
> the Free Software definition of the FSF, but I want to know the
> Trisquel community opinion.

We do follow the FSF definition, so we use their lists of free and
non-free licenses, but the case is not clear with this one. The FSF
says the license is not good, but doesn't say why exactly. I've just
asked Brett Smith and Richard Stallman about this issue.

> If the Artistic License 1.0 is not considered Free Software, I have to
> check some games included in Trisquel Gamer to make sure they are
> licensed under the AL 2.0. the same would be necessary for Trisquel in
> general.

I've wrote a script to download all the copyright files from the
packages in our repos, using the ubuntu changelog server. The result is
a tar.gz with 35916 debian copyright files, that we need to check:
http://devel.trisquel.info/licenses.tar.gz

After a quick check I've found several packages under this license, one
of them required by GNOME and installed by default: libxml-twig-perl

> A related quetion: There are packages in Debian/Ubuntu/Trisquel with a
> license with this clause:
> 
> Neither this software nor any of its individual components, in
> original or modified versions, may be sold by itself.
> 
> This example was taken from the package teeworlds
> 
> Does that clause make the license non free?

In practice, no. You can append the program to any other thing and send
both as a package. It can be a hello world snippet, or a cookie. This
trick makes the clause harmless, as it does with some font licenses.