Bug#833709: Please add the MIT/Expat license to common-licenses

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:

> Numerous packages use the MIT/Expat license, and currently all of those
> packages need to include it in their copyright files.  I'd love to see
> this license added to /usr/share/common-licenses/ ; this would require a
> Policy change to section 12.5 to allow.

I don't think this is a good idea.  This license is extremely short, and
it has a ton of minor variations, so we'll get a lot of people using it
even though the exactly licensing terms of their package don't match the
canonical copy.

For example, it's very common to see "THE AUTHORS" replaced with a
specific list of people or organizations in the license, which is a very
small change that's easy for someone to miss when they know that the terms
are just the Expat terms.

I think the common-license infrastructure is designed for licenses that
are small novels, like the GPL.  For something that's just three
paragraphs, putting it directly in the copyright file has a simplicity and
robustness that I think outweighs any minor one-time inconvenience during
packaging or a bit of additional disk space usage.

(And if I could go back in time, I'd pull the BSD license from
common-licenses on the same grounds.)

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