Search for "akkhara" and you'll find an app with a license listed as "Beerware", which apparently is known to SPDX: https://spdx.org/licenses/Beerware.html#page Discover labels it in orange and shows the proprietary warning button. However the license's full text is as follows: > "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): > > <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you > want with this stuff. If we > meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me > a beer in return. > > Poul-Henning Kamp This is not what I think any normal person would describe as "proprietary." It may not meet GNU definition of free (as in copyleft) software, but it's certainly not proprietary. Branding the app as having a proprietary license is incorrect.
That data comes from appstream which in turn draws from spdx directly. As the license is neither OSI nor FSF approved it is considered non-free there https://spdx.org/licenses/ https://github.com/ximion/appstream/blob/04fc478c9a2c432d69969287c3f2d0aa426cc95e/src/as-spdx-data.h#L118
Then it seems the problem is that we ask the question "is this an OSI or FSF approved free license?" And if we get a no, we present that in the UI as "this app uses a proprietary license". Discover's interpretation is questionable here. Maybe we need three states here: 1. Free software (uses an OSI or FSF-approved license) 2. Unfree software (license is explicitly marked as "proprietary") 3. Unknown licensing state (Doesn't use an OSI or FSF-approved license, but isn't explicitly marked as proprietary; read the license yourself to see what you can and can't do with it)
I guess. But spdx doesn't have a concept of [x] proprietary does it?
Not inherently, but I see a bunch of apps in Discover with a License that says "LicenseRef-Proprietary"
Maybe we need to reverse this. Instead of marking licenses as proprietary (which seems impossible), we instead mark licenses as "yay free software woohoo stars and twinkles" And then for everything not marked as free software, we show the info button popup, re-worded to say something like: "This application is not free software. Learn what that means [here]. Read its license and make sure you understand that limitations it imposes on you, and make sure you trust its authors."
Yeah, I fear marking everything proprietary that is explicitly so would seem to swing the pendulum in the other direction reporting more free than are actually free. Changing our presentation seems more reasonable in that regard. If something isn't OSI/FSF it may be anything.
Ok. I'll work on that.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/merge_requests/889
Git commit 37f3970c59a0554c33b215349b570a8130405e25 by Nate Graham. Committed on 20/08/2024 at 23:47. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. ApplicationPage: Be clearer about how we present and explain licenses Right now Discover considers any non-free license to be proprietary. But this is inaccurate; there are degrees of freedom, and a non-free license is not necessarily proprietary. This commit makes use of information already present to display a more nuanced set of explanations based on the level of freedom that the license offers: - Free - Non-Free - Proprietary - Unknown FIXED-IN: 6.2.0 M +82 -13 discover/qml/ApplicationPage.qml M +17 -17 libdiscover/appstream/AppStreamUtils.cpp https://invent.kde.org/plasma/discover/-/commit/37f3970c59a0554c33b215349b570a8130405e25