I still have xchat installed after it was removed from Debian (replaced
by hexchat) and gnome-software seems to think it is non-free even
though it is clearly not non-free. See below & the attached screenshot.

$ apt-cache show xchat | egrep 'Package|Section'
Package: xchat
Section: net

2016-05-15 10:24 GMT+02:00 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:

For stuff that is not in any repository *and* does not have an
AppStream metainfo file containing licensing information, GNOME
Software can not determine whether the software is free software.
That's why it displays the "might be non-free" badge, and I'm afraid
this issue can only be fixed in Xchat itself, by making it provide a
metainfo file (so the License doesn't stay "unknown"), or by
reintroducing it to a Debian repository (because we implicitly assume
everything in Debian main is Free software).
Cheers,
    Matthias

2016-05-15 10:24 GMT+02:00 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:

For stuff that is not in any repository *and* does not have an
AppStream metainfo file containing licensing information, GNOME
Software can not determine whether the software is free software.
That's why it displays the "might be non-free" badge, and I'm afraid
this issue can only be fixed in Xchat itself, by making it provide a
metainfo file (so the License doesn't stay "unknown"), or by
reintroducing it to a Debian repository (because we implicitly assume
everything in Debian main is Free software).
Cheers,
    Matthias

The requisite metadata is available (Debian Section), why can't
gnome-software pay attention to that information??

2016-05-15 18:36 GMT+02:00 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:

Where would that (machine readable) metadata be? Parsing
debian/copyright files is impractical, especially if they are not
machine-readable (which is the case with Xchat).

As I implied in the other email, the Section field in debian/control of
source packages indicates if a package is non-free or not and this
field is also present in the corresponding binary package and in the
dpkg status file for all packages, including manually installed ones.

2016-05-15 18:58 GMT+02:00 Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:

Yes, but consider that some random 3rd-party who doesn't know about
proper sections builds a package in section "misc": Then we would
claim the package to be free software while it clearly isn't.
TBH, I think any package not in the Debian repositories can not be
trusted to be DFSG-free at all, and therefore we shouldn't claim it to
be, unless the developer explicitly stated that in it's upstream
metadata by only having free licenses in its project_license tag.
That stuff is marked as "potentially non-free" is only a visual thing
btw, it won't prevent you to install/uninstall/rate the software.

(Marking this as wontfix early was probably a mistake, because I can
see why someone might have a different opinion on this matter... Maybe
that needs a project-wide decision, but from my experience 3rd-party
developers don't do packaging correctly and often produce bad deb
packages, and we really should not treat those as containing free
software, until it's clear that they are.)

Dear Maintainer,

Gnome Software reports Puredata as being proprietary. I've installed
Puredata from the Debian Stretch Backports repository, so not sure if
it's exactly the same bug.

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