On Sunday, January 15, 2023 5:17:10 PM MST Axel Beckert wrote:
> > Debian, of course, prefers the Expat name as it is more precise.
>
> According to
> https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat#Differences_between_DEP5_a
> nd_SPDX SPDX does not have the Expat license. They do have though the "MIT
> License" (the one and only ;-), so that would imply that they're not the
> same license.
Anyone who tells you there is a One And Only MIT License is trolling you. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#Ambiguity_and_variants
"The name 'MIT License' is potentially ambiguous. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been using many licenses for software since its creation; for example, MIT offers four licensing options for the FFTW C source code library, one of which is the GPL v2.0 and the other three of which are not open-source. The term 'MIT License' has also been used to refer to the Expat License (used for the XML parsing library Expat) and to the X11 License (also called 'MIT/X Consortium License'; used for X Window System by the MIT X Consortium). Furthermore, the 'MIT License' as published by the Open Source Initiative is the same as the Expat License. Due to this differing use of terms, some prefer to avoid the name 'MIT License'. The Free Software Foundation argues that the term is misleading and ambiguous, and recommends against its use.”
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat
As noted in the quote above, and in the second link, the license that is most commonly called the MIT License is what is appropriately referred to as the Expat license in Debian.
https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit
If you prefer I can open a separate bug about this issue, as it is my belief that Lintian should consider an Expat license in debian/copyright to not be a conflict with a MIT license in an AppStream metainfo.xml file.
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@stoutner.com
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.