Bug#697134: [copyright-format] Introduce a syntax for BSD-3-Clause variants
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> If the goal is to help automated analysis of license terms, then the
> approach above is quite imperfect as it will be hard to generalise
> beyond the BSD variants. More structured descriptions would be needed,
> with a complexity in between http://creativecommons.org/ns and
> http://www.w3.org/ns/radion.
Well, let's not let the best be the enemy of the good here. A solution
that doesn't generalize beyond the BSD/MIT/X Consortium/Expat family of
licenses would still be very valuable, as that family of licenses is
roughly half the licenses that I regularly see out there in the open
source world. It may be hard to extend a system to other license
families, but just solving that one problem would have a huge impact on
the percentage of Debian packages, say, that could be accurately
classified automatically for the purposes of license analysis.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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