Quoting Christopher Sean Morrison via License-discuss (license-discuss@lists.opensource.org):
> I didn’t say he did. He commented on a potential lack of public > hosting as grounds for “absolutely not even [coming] close to checking > whether a license is in use”. I commented on the general notion of > public availability and discoverability as being sufficient. Actually, what Thorsten Glaser said was: The problem is not the tooling to check for licences. The reason I postulate one can absolutely not even come anywhere close to checking whether a licence is in use is that people don’t necessarily use public hosting services, nor even all that well-known ones… I mean, who searches for things at edugit.org (ok maybe some) or evolvis.org… or even things like the MirBSD CVS repo or whatever private (but in theory publicly accessible) git self-hosting I do? (MirBSD or MirOS was through about 2016 Thorsten's initiative; thus his reference to self-hosting his code repo for it.) I think you cannot even get anything resembling a representative number even with quite some effort. The point seems well-taken: Often-suggested licence census tools tend to check only major public repos, and that couldn't establish that an OSI Approved licence isn't used, only that it wasn't grepped for in major public repos, because that is just _not_ a proxy for 'public availability and discoverability' (your term), hence not sufficient. > To me, it would be an absurd argument to suggest not even trying to > determine if a license is in use (anywhere) because it might only be > used in some obscure really hard to find place on the dark web or in > an isolated pocket of the Internet in China. Often-suggested licence census tools wouldn't even find the Post Office MUA source code in http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/apps/postoffice/ , and that's (for my sins) a site with fairly high search prominence in Silicon Valley. (Nothing against the Chinese, mind you, and Hong Kong is, after all, my home town, so please don't diss a country that can invent things as magical as Five Spice Powder and the wok.) (Of course, the specific Post Office codebase is GNU LGPL, but I think you understand the general principle.) > I look at the list of OSI licenses, and frankly would be surprised if > any of them do not have a trivially discoverable use. Well, if you're right, then that would sidestep Thorsten's point. But: > What I would expect is all but a handful are really trivial, and then > a more productive conversation (and more rigorous discovery) could be > made with those few. Again, implicitly this dismisses codebases not currently present in major public repos for whatever reason, or, further to Thorsten's point, with licence grants only in the Cyrillic or Greek or Devangari alphabets, etc. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@lists.opensource.org http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
