Bug#291460: Inclusion of Apache Software License versions in /usr/share/common-licenses
Manoj Srivastava dijo [Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 01:57:30PM -0500]:
> 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.
If 100% of Debian were to use the same license, we would be talking
about ~22000 license text repetitions. And imagine all of them were
GPL3 (the largest license in /usr/share/common-licenses) - That's
35068 bytes. Yes, that would amount to a whopping total of almost
735MB - Not at all something you can throw away, is it?
Well, but even if all of Debian were mutually installable (i.e. no
packages with conflicts: declared), how much space would _that_ take?
I don't dare to answer, but we were recently talking about the archive
size regarding CD image creation - We are at about 30 CDs now.
I understand we are sticking with producing 650MB CDs and not larger
images as there are still media that big - and maybe some readers
which won't take larger disks? Never mind... 30 CDs is about
19500MB. We would be losing up to 4% bytes by mindlessly repeating
that single license... Maybe even less, as the CDs are gzipped (they
contain .debs after all).
On an installed system, you say? Well, I have no data, but I guess,
once uncompressed, it would not take less than 35GB. What's 730MB next
to that? Oh, and how long is the HDD in this very generic machine I
got about a year ago? Two-hundred-and-something GB.
Of course, I'm playing with the numbers. There are still smaller
machines, there are the embedded-minded people, and of course, there
would be no sane way to verify the GPL3 was the same GPL3 all over if
we were to kill common-licenses - But basically, I'd not base the
definition in diskspace savings.
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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