Re: Bug#291460: Inclusion of Apache Software License versions in /usr/share/common-licenses
On Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:26:37 -0700, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> said:
> I'd love to see some sort of guideline for this so that we could make
> incorporation of new licenses into Policy more objective in the
> future. I do agree that either priorities or popcon installations or
> both should be taken into account as well as sheer quantity of
> packages.
The question is not how many people have installed the package,
the question is how many packages on a given machine have the same
copyright, and thus would benefit by savings in disk space by bundling
them together
This savings in diskspace is supposed to offset the fact that
the binary package alone is unusable, since it does not contain the
copyright; and that automated copyright file extractors get handed off
a pointer, not the actual copyright, which could be an issue.
The rule of thumb I have traditionally applied is to see if 5%
of the source packages in the archive use the license under
consideration, and use that as a gating point.
A better, though harder, test would be to poll actual
installations and see the disk saving that would result by bundling the
license, divided by the number of systems polled, but I do not know of
anyone actually conducting such a survey.
manoj
--
"What is inconceivable about the universe is that it is at all
conceivable." Albert Einstein
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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