Re: DEP-5: prior art for license short names
Le Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 11:30:07PM -0800, Steve Langasek a écrit :
>
> One concern I have with the current DEP5 draft is that the set of keywords
> for common licenses is very NIH. Fedora, for example, has an existing list
> of license keywords that are widely deployed, as can be found here:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Software_License_List
Hi Steve,
I wholeheartedly agree.
Note however that the above list uses the same short name for the ‘3-clause’
BSD (the one of the Regents of California) and the ‘2-clause BSD’ (the one of
the FreeBSD project), so it does not solve the problem discussed today. To pick
the best short names, I would actually recommend to ask the to FreeBSD project
itself how they prefer we refer to their license, if they are really the first
who introduced it.
I had a look at another problematic name, MIT, and it seems that the Fedora
project decided to aggregate mulitple varian ts with different disclaimers and
non-advertisement clauses under the same short name: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/MIT.
This actually does not work well with the DEP, since using the same short name
gives the possibility to simplify the Debian copyright file by including only
one full copy of the license. If they are more different than just whitespace
and commenting characters, we would be at risk of infringing one of them.
The short names picked by Fedora use indistinctively a space or the letter v to
distinguish version numbers in short names (for instance: ASL 1.0, AGPLv3). For
some other they do not indicate the version number at all (for instance:
‘Boost’ for the Boost Software License version 1.0). But that is not a problem
unless there is a real need for parsing the version number from the short name.
Shall we contact the Fedora project to check whether they have plans to keep
their list of short names stable in the long term? Given the various
imperfections in their list, it would be embarassing if we use it in the final
version of the DEP and then Fedora makes corrections shortly after.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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