[PROPOSAL] Policy should not list common licenses but say when a license is common

[Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis <luca@debian.org>]

# BTS controlling commands.
severity 201883 wishlist
retitle 201883 [PROPOSAL] Policy should not list common licenses but say when a license is common
thanks

Hi,
from 13.6:
     Packages distributed under the UCB BSD license, the Artistic license,
     the GNU GPL, and the GNU LGPL should refer to the files
     `/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD',
     `/usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic',
     `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL', and
     `/usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL' respectively, rather than quoting
     them in the copyright file.

I'm not sure this is the best way to handle common licenses: suppose that a
developer asks for the inclusion of the foo license that seems to have become
common among Debian packages (let's not define what 'common' is for a while),
You include it and that would be good for a while, but what if licenses start
to be really a lot (say 20)? Would you list all of them?

That leads me to another question: when a license is considered common? Would
you base the term 'common' from the number of binary packages referring to a
specific license or would you use source packages? And then, how many of them
do i need to be able to ask for such an inclusion? A proportional or an
absolute number?

I think that Policy should not list common license but say something like
this:
     Packages distributed under a license described in any file
     under '/usr/share/common-licenses/' should refer to that file, rather
     than quoting them in the copyright file.
(Sorry for my English, but I'd sure that English speakers would eventually
rephrase it better).

Then policy should dedicate a separate section/subsection for guidelines or
rules (depends on the result of this discussion) to decide when a license can
be considered common in Debian.

I propose to consider common any license that is used by more than X (i
suggest X to be 15) absolute number of actively maintained source packages.
Licenses that are referenced by less than X-Y (i suggest Y to be 3) source
packages, are entitled to be removed (A sort of buffer).

thanks,
-- 
Luca - De Whiskey's - De Vitis              | Elegant or ugly code as well
aliases: Luca ^De [A-Z][A-Za-z\-]*[iy]'\?s$ | as fine or rude sentences have
Luca, a wannabe ``Good guy''.               | something in common: they
local LANG="it_IT@euro"                     | don't depend on the language.