Re: DEP-5: prior art for license short names
Ben Finney wrote:
> Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:
> > One concern I have with the current DEP5 draft is that the set of
> > keywords for common licenses is very NIH.
>
> Well, that speaks to motives (NIH) that I don't think were present. I
> think it's just that the obvious clearing houses for license information
> (OSI, FSF) didn't provide a good list of short names so there appeared
> to be no option but to create our own.
A passable list of short names can be extracted from the anchor
ids in the FSF licensing list with the command:
curl -s http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/ \
| grep -A1 '<dt><a id' | sed -e 's/<a id="//;s/[<"][^>]*>/ /g'
Was that considered?
[...]
> > 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
>
> That page doesn't make clear how the “short name” is intended to be
> used, and what ambiguities are or are not acceptable. What assurance is
> there that these short names are sufficiently unambiguous, discrete, and
> distinct enough on which to found DEP 5 license declarations?
I share those concerns, particularly for the "with exceptions" ones.
Often with licensing, the devil is in the detail like that.
Hope that helps,
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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