Rolf Leggewie <debian-b...@rolf.leggewie.biz> writes: > please include the FreeBSD license among the ones in > /usr/share/common-licenses/ FreeBSD is not the same as BSD, only > similar. BSD has three clauses, FreeBSD only 2.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license > http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html The purpose of /usr/share/common-licenses (with one exception, see below) is not to accumulate good free software licenses, but rather primarily to save space both in the archive and on installed systems. For example, there are 19,893 packages in the archive that reference some form of the GPL, and given its length, we don't want to ship 19,893 copies of the GPL and have every Debian user have hundreds or thousands of copies of it installed. This argument, though, really doesn't apply to short licenses like the BSD-style licenses. For those licenses, just including the full text in debian/copyright doesn't take up any appreciable amount of space. Given that, the advantages of having the licensing directly contained with the work rather than redirected elsewhere are, I think, overwhelming. You're correct that we currently include the University of California version of the BSD license in common-licenses, but the general consensus is that this is for the combination of historical reasons (it's very difficult to ever remove a license from there) and because it's explicitly called out in the DFSG as a free software license. Were we doing this all over again, I don't think we would have included that license. Since, in addition to that, there are a lot of subtle wording variations in BSD-style licenses and including them in common-licenses tends to encourage people to point to common-licenses even when the wording is slightly different and they legally shouldn't do so, I don't think this is a good candidate for common-licenses. I'm accordingly marking this bug as rejected, although it will stay open for a while in case anyone disagrees and wants to make a case for inclusion. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ocfioed3....@windlord.stanford.edu
