Re: Including more licenses in 12.5
On 18 Jun 2006, Joerg Jaspert told this:
> How about including more licenses in the list in 12.5 (and at the
> same time adding them to base-files).
How many packages are there under this license? Seems to me
that in order for a license to be termed ``common'', it should indeed
be common -- and some sizeable fraction of Debian packages be
available under the terms of that license (the sizeable fraction to
be decided upon, of course, but shouldn't it at least 5-10%?)
> Good candidates, IMO, are: The python license, the ZPL, the ruby
> license.
Looking at my own machine, I can't assert that the license yet
meets that criteria.
Also, note the footnote in policy:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Why "common-licenses" and not "licenses"? Because if I
put just "licenses" I'm sure I will receive a bug report
saying "license foo is not included in the licenses
directory. They are not all the licenses, just a few
common ones. I could use /usr/share/doc/common-licenses
but I think this is too long, and, after all, the GPL
does not "document" anything, it is merely a license.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
What does common mean anyway?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Belonging to or shared by, affecting or serving, all the
members of a class, considered together; general; public;
as, properties common to all plants; the common schools;
the Book of Common Prayer.
common
adj 1: belonging to or participated in by a community as a whole;
public; "for the common good"; "common lands are set
aside for use by all members of a community" [ant: {individual}]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a tradeoff involved in not having the copyright file
included in a package; and the savings are not having multiple copies
of the same file over and over again. The informal rule of thumb
applied to such licenses is whether we have significant savings -- to
offset the fact the .deb does not carry the license in itself
(removing the copyright files raises the issue that the .deb is no
longer distributable by itself).
The reason that all possible licenses are not in the common
license directory is that not including the license directly in
/usr/share/doc/<package> requires anyone looking for a license to
take an extra step to find it; and only a substantial saving in disk
space justifies that extra step.
So, if there are at least 5% of the source packages (or
whatever number emrges from the debate that is sure to follow), we
can include the license into common license. A nice, objective
criteria for admission ;-)
manoj
Here are some quick and dirty results, for just one system
with a fraction of the total packages installed, good for ball park
estimates (some packages are dual licensed, for example). 5% of the
packages on my system turn out to be 181 packages, after
rounding. This seems like bad news for the BSD and the LGPL :)
__> grep-status -s Source '.' | sort -u | wc -l
1149
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | wc -l
3615
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l 'GNU.+General' |>
2154
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l Artistic | wc -l
504
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l 'GNU.+Lesser' | wc -l
252
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l 'GNU.+Library' | wc -l
174
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l 'Berkeley' | wc -l
82
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l 'Python.+Software' | wc -l
19
__> find /usr/share/doc -type f -name copyright | \
xargs egrep -l 'Zope' | wc -l
15
--
"I take Him shopping with me. I say, 'OK, Jesus, help me find a
bargain'" --Tammy Faye Bakker
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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