[DEP5] Expat or MIT license ?

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Dear all,

the current draft of DEP 5 contains the following instruction:

  “There are many versions of the MIT license. Please use Expat instead, when
   it matches.”

This recommendation predates the achievements of the SPDX work group, which
assembled a reference list of licenses and gave short names to them, for which
there is strong convergence with the ones used in Debian and Fedora.  It was
also announced on the SPDX blog that the OSI adopted the SPDX short license
names.

  http://www.spdx.org/content/celebrate-small-victories-and-cheers-open-source-initiative

I think that we can consider that this resolves potentials ambiguities on
how to define the “MIT” license, by referring to SPDX's definition.

  http://spdx.org/licenses/MIT

I therefore propose to remove from DEP 5 the recommendation to use “Expat”
instead of “MIT”, and to add it to the license list.

Related discussions:

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/08/msg00107.html
  http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/12/msg00047.html 

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan