Bug#833709: Please add the MIT/Expat license to common-licenses
On Mon, Aug 08, 2016 at 11:53:37AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
In the various packages I looked at, I haven't seen any such variation
of the MIT/Expat license. I've seen many variations of the MIT/X11
license, but not of Expat.
> 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.
For many of the packages I'd hoped to use it for, the sum total of the
license information in the upstream source consists of the following
line in the package metadata:
license = "MIT"
No copyright notices, no license file, just a simple statement of the
license name using canonical SPDX license identifiers.
For such packages, referencing a canonical copy of the license seems
preferable.
- Josh Triplett
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