Re: New script to check license usage
Brian Ryans <brian.l.ryans@gmail.com> writes:
> Quoting Russ Allbery on 2010-06-09 13:36:22:
>> The low bar for licenses included in common-licenses by license count
>> is the GFDL, at 875 packages using it in some version. None of the
>> licenses for which we have open bugs reach that package count. The
>> closest is the MPL version 1.1, at 654 packages.
> Perhaps an addition to policy to clarify such matters, something to the
> effect of "A license should be placed in common-licenses if {x% of
> Debian packages use it | y bytes will be saved by its inclusion}", would
> be useful? [1].
> If the idea's well liked I could go ahead and draft a diff.
> [1] In my idea, x could be 2-2.5, or y could be 15-20MiB. That's large
> enough to really save some space in the archive, yet small enough as to
> reflect current practice, as far as I see things.
3% right now is about 1000 binary packages, which feels like about the
right bar to me: I'm glad that we have the Apache 2.0 license in
common-licenses and I'm in favor of including the GPL version 1, but I
think the GFDL inclusion was borderline and would lean against it if we
had it to do over again.
The space savings that matters more is the typical Debian installation; in
terms of archive space, any conceivable space savings here for anything
short of the GPL is going to vanish with the upload of a few new
reasonable-sized games.
Maybe 3% of Debian binary packages plus saying that a majority (or
three-quarters?) of Debian installations have at least one copy of the
license installed? Measuring the latter is, of course, quite difficult.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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