Markus Koschany <a...@debian.org> writes: > Why do we add the BSD license to common-licenses but not MIT and zlib?
I'm not sure why the BSD license was included in common-licenses originally. My theory was that it was to include all the licenses mentioned by name in the DFSG. However, the version in common-licenses is specific to code whose copyright is held by the University of California, so it's not very useful. Including it there in that form was probably a mistake. We found multiple packages in Debian that referred to the common-licenses version of the BSD license but weren't actually released under that license. That's why Policy now says to not reference the version of the BSD license in common-licenses. We haven't removed it because it's very hard to do that. There are still quite a few packages in the archive that reference it (many possibly incorrectly). See https://bugs.debian.org/284340. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
