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tags 548335 + wontfix
thanks
Hi,
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%?)
Also, note the footnote in policy:
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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.
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What does common mean anyway?
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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}]
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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. The reason licenses are mentioned in
/usr/share/common-licenses is not that these are the only licenses that
are acceptable in main. Also, 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 disk space (and the bandwidth required to
transport s slightly larger package around) 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. [For embedded and very low memory systems, it would be far
better to just get dpkg to not unpack stuff in /usr/share/doc, or to
remove that after install].
Seems to me that making binary packages unusable on their own so
they can only be distributed _with_ the rest of Debian) is a big enough
obstacle that unless we have a compelling reason to have a common
licenses directory, we should not strip out the licenses from packages
and replace them with a pointer. It also makes it harder for automated
processes to extract the copyright file directly, though probably that
matters less.
Various criteria have been suggested for drawing the line (I
favour a guideline of having the license used by, say, 5% of the binary
packages; Russ suggested something like 10% of popcon-reporting
systems having at least two packages using that license. I think we
should compromise on something within these bounds). In any case, I do
not think that the CC-BY-3.0 licenses meet this criteria yet.
So, while I am not opposed to rethinking where the bar should be
for common-licenses, I would prefer us to examine the cost/benefit
ratio, and personally I tend to be for _shrinking_ common-licenses, not
expanding it.
manoj
ps: I have a head cold, and this mail was crafted under the effect of
cough medicine under the influence of which I am not supposed to be
driving heavy machinery.
--
Do something unusual today. Pay a bill.
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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