Re: packages under the AGPL-3 license
Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 01:28:26AM +0530, Ritesh Raj Sarraf wrote:
>> I am working on packaging the LIO tools [1]. The userspace component is
>> licensed under AGPL-3.
>> As per Debian bug #621462, the license is not part of common-licenses
>> because there aren't many consumers for it, yet.
> The data referenced by that buglog are 15 months old. Although I doubt
> they've changed enough to overtake the minimum threshold, it would be
> nice to re-evaluate them. For one thing, the growth rate might give
> insights about the future "market share" of the license.
> TBH, AGPL is likely to become a popular license. Having maintainers
> include it verbatim in packages nowadays, to factor it out a few years
> from now, doesn't seem like a useful exercise...
Actually, based on the surveys I've done of licensing information, I think
it's unlikely that the AGPL will ever become that popular of a license. I
doubt it will even pass the GFDL, which we probably should not have
accepted into common-licenses.
Due to a combination of a limitation of the Lintian lab format and the
file system on lintian.d.o, the Lintian lab is not currently complete, but
I can get partial information. I updated the license check script in the
Policy tools directory and ran it against the current Lintian lab. It
shows 31 packages in the archive covered by the AGPL version 3, which is
of course far, far too few to even be thinking about common-licenses at
this point.
Here's the complete statistics for the licenses that the tools script
knows how to search for. The restriction to 31,998 packages is because
we've hit the link count maximum for an ext3 directory.
I personally consider 1000 packages to be the appropriate level for
considering including something new in common-licenses, but I'm fairly
conservative on that front. The closest (by far) of the licenses not
already listed there, and the best case for inclusion, is the MPL 1.1 at
740 packages. The next closest contender would be the CDDL at 219
packages.
AGPL 3 31
Apache 2.0 1474
Artistic 2776
Artistic 2.0 50
BSD (common-licenses) 569
CC-BY 3.0 68
CC-BY-SA 3.0 133
CDDL 219
CeCILL 20
CeCILL-B 11
CeCILL-C 20
GFDL (any) 939
GFDL (symlink) 395
GFDL 1.2 550
GFDL 1.3 79
GPL (any) 21496
GPL (symlink) 8326
GPL 1 2159
GPL 2 10821
GPL 3 3785
LGPL (any) 7977
LGPL (symlink) 2134
LGPL 2 5689
LGPL 2.1 4084
LGPL 3 947
LaTeX PPL 181
LaTeX PPL (any) 131
LaTeX PPL 1.3c 120
MPL 1.1 740
SIL OFL 1.0 16
SIL OFL 1.1 88
Total number of packages: 31998
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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