Created attachment 147888 [details] Discover thinks public domain license is nonfree The "free" property of this license returns false, rather than true. See screenshot.
Neither FSF or OSI consider any of the public domain licenses free or open. https://spdx.org/licenses/ In any case, this is something that know is delegated to appstream and it would be good if we can keep handling it there: https://github.com/ximion/appstream/blob/master/src/as-spdx.c#L741
That seems like a very weird decision on the part of the FSF and OSI. Public Domain is the freest license of all since anyone can do anything they want with it; there are zero restrictions, not even the restriction of copyleft licenses that are commonly considered free. I have a feeling that the question of "freedom to be used in nonfree software in the future vs restricted in order to preserve freedom forever" is a highly political topic and there is 0% chance of minds being changed upstream. Meanwhile, for something with a public domain license, Discover colors the license name in orange and shows the "risks of proprietary software" sheet, which are objectively the wrong things to do. Software that incorporates public domain imagery will get branded here. Can we reconsider and add some special-casing in Discover?
Aha! Based on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#PublicDomain, "public domain" is not considered a free license by the FSF purely due to a technicality: being in the public domain is not a license in the first place. However they say that all public domain content is GPL-compatible. So I think we should special-case public domain in Discover's definition of "free" to include public domain "licenses."
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/288
Git commit 821f3ea6f0d996bf08fcc0745c364ce6a230195a by Aleix Pol. Committed on 04/04/2022 at 18:31. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. Improve how we display public domain licenses Name them as "Public Domain". Identify them as "with freedom" even though they are not free licenses due to some technicality. M +2 -2 discover/qml/ApplicationPage.qml M +5 -1 libdiscover/appstream/AppStreamUtils.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/commit/821f3ea6f0d996bf08fcc0745c364ce6a230195a