Debian Bug report logs - #885698
Update and document criteria for inclusion in /usr/share/common-licenses

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Subject: Bug#885698: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?
Reply-To: Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]>, [email protected]
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From: Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]>
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To: [email protected]
Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2023 18:30:52 +0200
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[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Quoting Russ Allbery (2023-09-10 18:16:07)
> Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > In order to structure the discussion and prod people into thinking about
> > the implications, I will make the following straw man proposal.  This is
> > what I would do if the decision was entirely up to me:
> 
> >     Licenses will be included in common-licenses if they meet all of the
> >     following criteria:
> 
> >     * The license is DFSG-free.
> >     * Exactly the same license wording is used by all works covered by it.
> >     * The license applies to at least 100 source packages in Debian.
> >     * The license text is longer than 25 lines.
> 
> In the thread so far, there's been a bit of early convergence around my
> threshold of 100 packages above.  I want to make sure people realize that
> this is a very conservative threshold that would mean saying no to most
> new license inclusion requests.
> 
> My guess is that with the threshold set at 100, we will probably add
> around eight new licenses with the 25 line threshold (AGPL-2,
> Artistic-2.0, CC-BY 3.0, CC-BY 4.0, CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC-BY-SA 4.0, and
> OFL-1.1, and I'm not sure about some of those because the CC licenses have
> variants that would each have to reach the threshold independently; my
> current ad hoc script does not distinguish between the variants), and
> maybe 10 to 12 total without that threshold (adding Expat, zlib, some of
> the BSD licenses).  This would essentially be continuing current practice
> except with more transparent and consistent criteria.  It would mean not
> including a lot of long legal license texts that people have complained
> about having to duplicate, such as the CDDL, CeCILL licenses, probably the
> EPL, the Unicode license, etc.
> 
> If that's what people want, that's what we'll do; as I said, that's what I
> would do if the choice were left entirely up to me.  But I want to make
> sure I give the folks who want a much more relaxed standard a chance to
> speak up.

Good point.

Another way of reading the responses is that there was some interest in
including even more licenses.

I would also prefer inclusion of more licenses, simply had the
impression that a) we could do that step by step, and b) my habit of
writing copyright files (and other teksts) using [semantic linebreaks]
made me forget that Expat license is arguably only 3 lines long (whereas
in my style of writing it is 24-25 lines long).

If "include all SPDX licenses" is for some reason (space in minimal
systems?) problematic, then let me propose a threshold of 1000
characters - as that just about covers Expat ;-)


 - Jonas


[semantic linebreaks]: https://sembr.org/

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