Re: Differentiating BSD-style licenses (was: DEP5: Machine-readable debian/copyright (the paperwork))

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 01:22:47PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Here are reasons why I do not think that licenses inspired by the BSD license
> can be efficiently classified by counting the number of clauses.
>
> First, the license of the Berkeley Software Distribution ("BSD") source code
> copyrighted by the Regents of the University of California has a
> non-endorsement clause that is frequently edited each time this license is used
> as a template by another project. Therefore, it is not possible to use the same
> short name for them, since “3-clause BSD” would not refer to the same license
> when sources from two different projects are aggregated in the same package.

Using the following description would it make less ambiguous even
without the need to check the annex:

  BSD  Revised Berkeley software distribution license

> To remove any ambiguity, we can add an annex to the DEP with a copy of
> all the licences for which it specifies a short name.

I think adding an annex is a good idea.

> For the licenses inspired by the Regents of the University of
> California’s BSD license, I would rather try to work on extending the
> DEP to include a concept of being ‘similar to’ other licenes. This
> would be useful for other cases than the BSD.

I like the idea of adding a similarity concept too, but to comply with:

| Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
| notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
| documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

... there needs to be an exact copy of the licence in the binary itself,
the copyright file or in e.g. /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD.  So adding
such a concept could help to make copyright files more machine readable
but not to shorten them for packages using “similar licenses”.


Regards
Carsten