Applications from the extras archive are listed as 'Proprietary'

[David Planella]

Looking at https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/qreator/, I see the license listed as 'Proprietary', which is not actually the case.

The license is GPL v3, and it is correctly chosen in MyApps and also appears correctly listed as such on the Software Centre. The only place it is shown as 'Proprietary' is on apps.ubuntu.com.

[John Pugh (jpugh)]

The license is depicted correctly on the distro series page, however that page has many inconsistencies with the main application page. See bug #1015515

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

dpm,

Thanks for reporting this. The Apps Directory should be able to get the exact license for an app from the information in the API currently, so I'll mark this as invalid for devportal.

[Michael Nelson (michael.nelson)]

Pre-imp. thoughts:

Currently any app data imported from SCA's "available_apps for purchase" API have Application.for_purchase set to true - which is obviously not the case any more.

Application.license_type is a property which just returns either "Proprietary" or "Open Source" depending on Application.for_purchase.

We could just update such that Application.for_purchase is set to False for non-commercial apps and fix this immediate issue, but that sounds like it'll just create other problems (ie. OSS apps that can be purchased as a form of donation etc.)

So, I'd think the best solution would be simply to add an Application.license_identifier text field which will store whatever value we get from the API, and update the license_type property to something like: "if license_identifier is blank or not 'Proprietary', then it's 'Open Source', otherwise 'Proprietary'.

Also, I'm assuming it's fine to leave license_identifier blank for archive apps and assume 'Open Source'? (ie. I don't see any more specific license info in the desktop files from app-install-data).

[Anthony Lenton (elachuni)]

I can think of two ideas for this:

a) Add a "license" field to Application, and use it to store the "license" field provided by MyApps in the api for each app. As you suggest, I'd say it's safe to leave license blank for archive apps and assume "open source" until we figure out a better way to determine the exact license of archive apps.

b) I think "for_purchase" is a confusing name, I'm not sure which of three things it means without looking at the code:
 - If it's actually used as "comes from myapps" it might be better to rename the field, and leave the code that uses it as-is. I guess we should also think about renaming the "import_for_purchase_apps" command to something more appropriate also.
 - If it's actually used as "non-libre" (to decide the license type) then one possible improvement would be to only set it to true for apps that use the private ppa archive, or remove it if we implement a), and replace it with a method that checks the "license" field.
 - If it's actually used as "non-gratis" (to decide if price == 0) then it could be removed and replaced with a method that checks the "price" field. I'd like to think this isn't the case or we'd not have added it at all.