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

Package: debian-policy; Maintainer for debian-policy is Debian Policy Editors <[email protected]>; Source for debian-policy is src:debian-policy (PTS, buildd, popcon).

Reported by: Sean Whitton <[email protected]>

Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2017 09:51:01 UTC

Severity: important

Blocking fix for 1009343: please consider adding Boost-1.0 and Expat to /usr/share/common-licenses, 1013195: Add AGPL-3 to common-licenses, 795402: base-files: Please add Creative Commons license texts, 833709: Please add the MIT/Expat license to common-licenses, 883966: debian-policy: please add MIT/Expat to common licenses, 883968: debian-policy: please add CC-BY-SA-3.0 to common licenses, 883969: debian-policy: please add CC-BY-SA-4.0 to common licenses, 884223: debian-policy: please add AGPL-3.0 to common licenses, 884224: debian-policy: please add CC-BY-3.0 to common licenses, 884225: debian-policy: please add CC-BY-4.0 to common licenses, 884226: debian-policy: please add EPL-1.0 to common licenses, 884227: debian-policy: please add zlib to common licenses, 884228: debian-policy: please add OFL-1.1 to common licenses, 910548: base-files - please consider adding /usr/share/common-licenses/Unicode-Data, 924094: Add Artistic-2.0 to common-licenses

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From: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> (Russ Allbery's message of "Sat,
	09 Sep 2023 20:35:27 -0700")
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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.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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