Bug#487201: MPL-license
On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 10:42:12AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Dmitry E. Oboukhov" <dimka@avanto.org> writes:
>
> > The list of packages with full text of MPL-license:
>
> Thank you for doing this search.
>
> By pure numbers, that's not a sufficient number of packages to warrant
> inclusion in common-licenses according to the criteria previously
> discussed here. (I think it falls short by hundreds.)
>
> The only thing that makes me hesitate somewhat is that some of the
> packages that include the MPL are very popular packages that are widely
> installed on desktop systems (although not on servers). It looks like
> over 60% of popcon-reporting systems have iceweasel installed and
> therefore have a copy of this license already.
>
> Once again, we're stuck on the problem that we don't really have a clear
> way of making this decision and what criteria should count. If we use a
> pure numeric criteria (10% of the archive), we'll admit almost nothing
> into common-licenses and some of what's already there wouldn't qualify.
> If we use a popularity-weighted number, we'll include a lot more, probably
> including MPL and possibly also the LaTeX license, etc., but it's not
> clear to me whether that would be a good thing.
>
> (Incidentally, right now the iceweasel package doesn't include the MPL in
> debian/copyright, but instead in a separate file next to debian/copyright,
> which surprised me. That's actually not allowed by Policy -- it prevents
> automatic extraction of licenses from the package -- although probably not
> a horribly important bug in the lead-in to a release.)
Note this is not exactly a problem, as the MPL is only one of the
possible licenses for the code.
Also note the copyright file is already 750 lines, the MPL text would
almost double this, and make the file less readable.
Mike
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