Re: DEP licenses
MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> writes:
> I don't think Expat has any significant additional feature. Expat is
> usually used as the name to avoid the ambiguity caused by referring to
> MIT, X11 or BSD (each of which has used several very different licences
> over time) and for an explicit inclusion of "associated documentation
> files" as "Software". However, it's not in common-licenses (yet?).
The purpose of common-licenses is not to collect all DFSG-free licenses.
The criteria is the number of packages in Debian that use that license,
particularly by popularity. Licenses go into common-licenses when they
save substantial space, essentially.
If someone wants to do the analysis work to show that this is true of the
Expat license and it looks reasonable (>100 packages, preferrably >200
packages, including fairly widely installed ones -- I feel the most
comfortable if at least 1/5th of the systems reporting in popcon have at
least a couple of packages installed that use that license), then please
file a bug against debian-policy with the details of that analysis.
The BSD license currently in common-licenses is something of an anomoly,
and were we doing it all over again, it would probably not be there since
it usually can't be referenced correctly by packages (it lists a specific
copyright holder). But it's not clear to me whether it's worth the effort
to withdraw it or change it at this point.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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