Bug#883966: debian-policy: please add MIT/Expat to common licenses
Markus Koschany <apo@debian.org> writes:
> I have been working on ~500 packages during the past five years and I
> have never seen a package that used a different version of this license.
That's surprising, since I maintain a package that has three different
versions just in that one package. Are you sure that every one of those
500 packages said "THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS" in the last paragraph
and didn't substitute in their names?
Humans will frequently not notice the differences. I have software that
constructs a debian/copyright file that requires a word-for-word match
with the license statement, so maybe this is more obvious to me?
> When upstream mentions the MIT license nowadays it is almost 100 %
> certain that they refer to this license. I know there are different
> wordings but that should not stop us from including the MIT-Expat
> license in Debian.
I understand this desire for longer licenses. This one is three
paragraphs long. I really don't get why it's such a problem to reproduce
that in debian/copyright.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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