On 28 Feb 2005 12:25:52 GMT MJ Ray wrote:
> Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it> wrote:
> > On 25 Feb 2005 11:17:19 GMT MJ Ray wrote:
> > > Well-meaning authors can go look at similar packages already
> > > in main and check the copyright file.
> > Imitating other licensors and repeating the same poor choices again
> > and again? [...]
>
> Maybe, but good/poor comments are a bit more judgement than
> the DLSes give too. They say "this licence is foo" rather than
> giving recommendations for what you think is the most common
> want.
I'm sorry but I cannot make a sense of this (I'm not a native speaker).
Could you please express the same ideas with other words?
Thank you in advance for your patience. :p
> Interestingly, the recommendations given on this list
> are pretty consistent (modBSD, MIT/X11 and GPL) but mentioned
> in the unofficial FAQ rather than the /legal/licenses/ page.
Well, I think good summaries *should* (besides other things) give useful
recommendations to authors that are considering to release software
under the reviewed license: either stating that it's a good choice or
recommending similar but better licenses (e.g.: Expat or 2-clause-BSD if
you are considering CC-by, GPL if you are considering CC-by-sa, and so
forth...).
>
> > IMHO, license proliferation should be limited as far as possible,
> > not encouraged...
>
> I agree, which is part of the reason why I said "similar packages"
> to hopefully make it easy to combine within a field.
Well, but what if similar packages are under a problematic license
(maybe not enough to be make the software non-free, but still annoying:
think of the 4-clause-BSD, if you want to focus on a concrete example)?
>
> > > If anyone thinks it's a good idea to generate indexes from
> > > copyright files, I'm happy to help, but I don't have a local
> > > debian mirror to play with.
> > Could you elaborate?
> > What do you mean by indexes in this context?
> > Something like database indexes?
>
> Something like: this licence is associated with these packages.
That would be useful, indeed.
Among other things, we would be able to evaluate how much a particular
license is used in the context of a particular section (main, contrib,
non-free) or in the general context of Debian mirror network...
--
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
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