Qucs is missing

The reason is upstream doesn't have it anymore. [1,2] Looks like the reason was

"Qucs was in Debian until Squeeze, but it had to be removed because it
didn't compile with qt4 libs. Recently, upstream has released a qt4
based version, so I'm intending to include it in Debian again."

and it might be coming back eventually. Uh oh, apparently there are some licensing problems too... :-( [3]

1 http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=qucs
2 https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=qucs
3 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=714836

> apparently there are some licensing problems too... :-( [3]

I feel dirty :S . How can I check if software is completely free (just point me in the right direction, please).

Should we close this one?

Basically you need to go through every file in the source and see they have a free software license [1] in them. And that there are no binaries in the source. Sometimes people just drop one license file that implicitly covers all files and there is no license in all files... and sometimes in such cases when going though the files you can find all rights reserved stuff!

I think we can leave it open, perhaps somebody interested will intervene. It might be possible to just rip out the non-free parts and repackage working qucs. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it though.

1 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Leaving my five cents:

I think that you should do research. Then maybe you do not need to go through all the packages?
Google whatever you are installing. See if it is completely free.
(:

Never hurts to google, who knows. Maybe you will learn something new!

Good Luck!!

--Victoria Diamond

Thanks for your comment. I am a little bit naïve: I am using an operating system which I did not develop. According to it, I should be able to inspect the code and see for myself that it is free, but I don't have the time to do it every time. However, and this is the main point, I trust that it will only allow free software in my computer. There is the possibility that something escaped from the auditing process, and I should make a better effort to prevent it.

Qucs claims that it is free software, but it evidently is not. I don't know to what type of web search you refer, but I believe that it should go beyond a self-appointed sticker which says "Come in, we are free!" on a website. In fact, there are many operating systems which claim to be free, but are not endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF.org), because they allow binary blobs or some other sort of issues (remember Ubuntu?).

I will leave this thread open, under the assumption that it will be closed once the Qucs issue is solved "upstream" (whatever that is) :) .

I wish to kindly thank you again. I do think that learning is very important.

--
elektro

Upstream means going towards the original developers. E.g. upstream for Trisquel means first ubuntu, then debian and finally the people behind the single packages the distros consist of.