gnome-software reports that Minetest license is proprietary

[akozlovskiy119]

I believe Minetest is Free software? Minetest repository appdata file (misc/net.minetest.minetest.appdata.xml) contains:

<project_license>LGPL-2.1+ and CC-BY-SA-3.0 and MIT and Apache-2.0</project_license>

Screenshot from gnome-software:

[akozlovskiy119]

According to https://spdx.org/licenses/:

• LGPL-2.1+ considered deprecated
• CC-BY-SA-3.0 is not considered free license by FSF and not approved by OSI either, it seems to be the main problem

[Calinou]

I guess we can list only the source code licenses to fix this (and use the current LGPL-2.1-or-later license string instead of the deprecated one).

[akozlovskiy119]

Appstream uses spdx-free-license-ids.txt file to check if license is free. This value then used directly in gnome-software.

Yes, there are a lot of bugs related to specifying licenses not in this list, like CC-BY-SA-3.0, for example in GNOME Mahjongg.

Is this something we can even fix on our end?

Based on the above, it seems that appstream and gnome-software handle the license data correctly, so this can only be fixed by the application itself.

we can list only the source code licenses

Seems like the right answer. This is what devs suggest for Mahjongg, for example.

[akozlovskiy119]

Actually, this is clearly stated in appstream docs now:

The license given in the project_license tag should be the ‘main’ license of the project. For a software project, this is typically the license for the code. It is not recommended to include the license for accompanying documentation (for example) in project_license, as that could confuse users. In particular, the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license which is commonly used for documentation is not an (FSF or OSI) approved license for free software, so including it in project_license results in the project as a whole being considered non-free.

[astrosticks]

Gnome Software now displays the license in a favorable light. Time to close this issue?