Bug#487201: MPL-license

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> Russ Allbery writes ("Bug#487201: MPL-license"):

>> 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.)

> I don't think pure numbers is the only thing we should be considering
> here.  The costs either way in bandwidth and diskspace are modest.

> But having a licence in common-licences acts as if it were a kind of
> approval - even if we don't intend it that way.  So we should only put
> licences there that we actually like.

> I would suggest that the MPL is not a licence that we like and want to
> lend encouragement and visibility.

I recently did a survey of both licenses already listed in common-licenses
and ones proposed for common-licenses using a Perl script that's now in
the debian-policy Git repository.  The result was that the MPL version 1.1
was used by 654 binary packages in the archive.

This is by far the best claim of any of the proposed new licenses for
common-licenses, although it still falls short of the least-used license
already in common-licenses (the GFDL, used by 875 binary packages in some
variant or version) and certainly well short of the 5% of the archive
standard that Manoj proposed (which would be 1473 binary packages).

On the other criteria we've used in the past, popcon, the MPL 1.1 fares
relatively well, since Iceweasel references it and could replace its copy
with a link to common-licenses and is installed by 50% of the systems
reporting via popcon.

I'm not sure to what extent including something in common-licenses is an
approval.  We included the GFDL because it was widely used and looked
likely to be more widely used, despite the fact that the project
definitely isn't very fond of it.

So I'm torn on this one, and the discussion also seemed divided.  I'm
leaning mildly towards rejecting it, but only very mildly.

Other opinions?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>