Hi all, One concern I have with the current DEP5 draft is that the set of keywords for common licenses is very NIH. Fedora, for example, has an existing list of license keywords that are widely deployed, as can be found here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Software_License_List I think we should consider adopting this existing set of license keywords as part of the DEP, and diverging from it only when necessary in order to resolve ambiguities or reduce complexity (e.g., using a single rule about version numbers instead of spelling these all out). I see a few advantages to this approach: - we benefit from previous efforts of the Fedora community to identify commonly used licenses and disambiguate them - it becomes more practical for third parties to collate license information from multiple sources if there's a common vocabulary - it should enable upstreams to autogenerate license information for both distributions from a common source, reducing duplication (And I don't think existing deployments of the draft spec in debian/copyright files is a reason to avoid exploring this option, since there are any number of other proposed changes on the table that would also invalidate existing usage.) Since this will shake up the list of license keywords substantially from where it is in the draft today, I recommend having this discussion immediately and setting aside for the moment other threads proposing fixes to individual license keywords; depending on the outcome here those proposals may cease to be relevant or need to be adapted significantly. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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