Am 28.12.2017 um 11:21 schrieb Bill Allombert: > On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 01:56:44PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote: >> Jonathan Nieder <jrnie...@gmail.com> writes: >>> Markus Koschany wrote: >> >>>> as discussed on debian-devel [1] I would like to request that more DFSG >>>> licenses are added to /usr/share/common-licenses and that package >>>> maintainers are allowed to reference them. >>>> >>>> License: OFL-1.1 >>>> Source: https://opensource.org/licenses/OFL-1.1 >>>> Example packages: >>>> https://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#The_SIL_Open_Font_License >> >>> Seconded. >> >> license-count says this makes sense: >> >> SIL OFL 1.0 12 >> SIL OFL 1.1 159 >> >> via the historic criteria of more usage than the least popular license >> already in common-licenses (GFDL 1.3 at 138 packages). > > This is not an entirely reasonnable criterion, though. The GFDL is losing > popularity. At some point there might be zero packages under the > GFDL 1.3, at which point the criterion would dictate that all licenses > should be included. > > Also If you look at the license-count email archive, you will see that the > GFDL 1.3 should probably not have been included in the first place > (it was expected that more packages would migrate from 1.2 to 1.3). > So it makes better sense to count GFDL 1.2+1.3 as a single number. > > The usual threshold for inclusion was much higher than 138. > > Cheers,
We really should move away from making a distinction between popular and non-popular DFSG licenses. Nowadays nobody in the project can tell within seconds how many DFSG-free licenses there are. Under my original proposal we would add _all_ licenses which were accepted by the FTP team to /usr/share/common-licenses. This has two main advantages. First of all we could easily answer the question what licenses are accepted by the Debian project and could encourage other people to use them for their own projects. For a project which prides itself for its Social Contract and Free Software Guidelines it is kind of embarrassing that we cannot immediately tell our users and contributors what licenses we consider to be free. Just by adding them to /usr/share/common-licenses we could improve the documentation for one of the legal cornerstones of this project. The second point is: The current Policy punishes maintainers for maintaining large and diverse packages with fonts, images, data and media files, multiple contributors and software licenses. IMO we should value developer time much more than disk space and current popularity of a license. Also the criterion of popularity does not take into account that some licenses are more frequently used in specific fields of endeavor. If you don't maintain a lot of -data or documentation packages with fonts, images or other media files, this is probably not an issue for you. But the current state surely is annoying for contributors who are interested to develop parts of Debian where the OFL or CC licenses are very popular and common. Regards, Markus
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