[Pkg-doc-linux-devel] Checking licenses

[doug jensen]

Hi,

Just some ideas on license checking, with a few questions at the end.

Automatically checking the licenses of new howtos would be very difficult
becuse:
  - There is no standard, the license could be anything.
  - Even when the howto has a standard license, the author may add text
    before or after, that could change the freeness of the document.

Checking updated howtos for license changes is:
  - difficult <= not fun, to do manually.
  - Easier to do automatically and could improve the checking accuracy.
    (Documents that have no license still need to be checked manually,
    but extraction from the tar file could be automated.)
  
Automating the checking of updated howtos would carry a small risk.  The
howto author could add restrictions in the document that the checking
program would not find.  However, it should be ligitimate to assume that
all licensing requirements be stated in only one section of the document.

My thought is that we need a file containing a grep-able line for each
howto:
  # Grep finds the first line of the licensing statement, then extracts
  # the lines up to and *including* the first line of the next section.
  # Used for comparing the HOWTO licenses before and after they are updated.
  Apache-WebDAV-LDAP-HOWTO -A 0 '^No license'
  Athlon-Powersaving-HOWTO -A 16 '^1.2. Copyright and License'
  C-C++Beautifier-HOWTO -A 9 '^Copyright'
* UPS-HOWTO -A 10 '^  v2.42, 18 November 1997'
  User-Group-HOWTO -A 9 '^  8.1.  Terms of use'
* Note that the UPS-HOWTO is a little odd because it has no license section.

The grep file is just a few lines long right now, but I would like to continue
building it, if it will be useful to the project.  Also, I have written a little
script that checks the licenses, but it is not production quality (intended to
mean if you want to write the program, don't let this hinder you.) 

Questions:
  - Do you have other or better ideas?
  - Would you be in favor of this approach?
  - Does the grep file seem appropriate?
  - Is the format ok?
  - It would require maintenance, is that ok?

Thank you for taking the time to read this.


--
Doug Jensen