Bug#884228: debian-policy: please add OFL-1.1 to common licenses

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Markus Koschany wrote:
> Am 28.12.2017 um 11:21 schrieb Bill Allombert:
>> On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 01:56:44PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

>>>> Seconded.
>>>
>>> license-count says this makes sense:
>>>
>>> SIL OFL 1.0              12
>>> SIL OFL 1.1             159
>>>
>>> via the historic criteria of more usage than the least popular license
>>> already in common-licenses (GFDL 1.3 at 138 packages).
[...]
>> The usual threshold for inclusion was much higher than 138.
[...]
> We really should move away from making a distinction between popular and
> non-popular DFSG licenses. Nowadays nobody in the project can tell
> within seconds how many DFSG-free licenses there are. Under my original
> proposal we would add _all_ licenses which were accepted by the FTP team
> to /usr/share/common-licenses.

I am confident that we lack consensus for that original proposal.

I have some sympathy for moving to a different threshold or a
different criterion for inclusion in common-licenses.  But let me just
say now to avoid wasted time: I am not going to be supportive of
turning base-files into a compendium of all DFSG licenses.  There are
multiple reasons that I don't think that's in users' best interests.
I've already discussed some of them and haven't heard any convincing
new points in response.

> Also the criterion of popularity does not take into account that some
> licenses are more frequently used in specific fields of endeavor. If you
> don't maintain a lot of -data or documentation packages with fonts,
> images or other media files, this is probably not an issue for you. But
> the current state surely is annoying for contributors who are interested
> to develop parts of Debian where the OFL or CC licenses are very popular
> and common.

As I've already said multiple times, if you are using copyright-format
1.0 to maintain multiple packages and it is getting in your way,
please please please, fix your workflow and improve documentation so
others can benefit from the same workflow changes.  Work with upstream
to ensure they have high quality license documentation that you can
use as-is (or that you can use after some mechanical transformations
--- e.g. I've heard of R module packagers having some success with
that approach).  Changing the list of licenses in base-files does not
change this at all.

All that said, I still support including the SIL OFL 1.1 in
common-licenses.  I also agree with you that number of packages is an
imperfect criterion --- the OFL 1.1 is not only used by a large number
of packages but many of those packages are popular, so the resource
savings (archive space in partial mirrors, bandwidth, CD size, etc) is
greater than it might seem at first glance.

Thanks,
Jonathan