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Reporting if a license is free software according to the FSF

Read How LIDESC detects and reports licensing conflicts for an overview and web-based demonstration. This page describes how to use the command line utility to perform a specific test.

The Free Software Foundation maintains a set of principles of software freedom. They publish a list of software licenses which they have evaluated according to those principles.

CAUTION: license compatibility reports are only as good as the description files created by human interpretation of license texts. You should obtain them from trusted suppliers, and be careful when creating them yourself. If a symbol list for a license is empty or incomplete, it is not possible to accurately report incompatibility.

The command line to check for consistency with the free software principles of the Free Software Foundation is:

	lidesc [-d {license-dir}] combine fsf.txt license.txt

{license-dir} is the optionally provided location of license description files.By default it is '.'
license.txt is the name of the license text file to test.

Example output:

OK  No license conflicts detected (librock/license/fsf.txt librock/license/bsdorig.txt)

WARNING: It is folly to assume that a simple program like this can do anything more than find and report some of the biggest problems, while leaving others undetected. This system does not match the educated human intelligence required to interpret and apply licenses. On the other hand, it can be useful to identify some of the license clauses which deserve extra scrutiny.

Up to: Reporting when incompatible licenses are used
Up to: LIDESC User Documentation
See also: Example licenses which were evaluated by the FSF as Passed or Failed

Librock LIDESC. Software License Analyzer and Compatibility Reporter
Copyright 2001-2002, Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software
You may reproduce verbatim copies of this page, but changing it is not allowed.
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