Am 28.12.2017 um 23:10 schrieb Russ Allbery: > 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.
I see. Thanks for your explanation. Apparently including more DFSG-licenses is a recurring theme. It is telling that this even goes back to 2004. One faction would like to see BSD/MIT/zlib aka permissive short-licenses included, the other side believes this could be ambiguous and mistakes are inevitable. *sigh* This is like prohibiting cars for transportation because they could be used as weapons or football matches because someone could get hurt. I believe we make life for us more difficult than necessary. Well, I guess it can't be helped...
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
