On Sunday, January 15, 2023 5:17:10 PM MST Axel Beckert wrote:
> > Debian, of course, prefers the Expat name as it is more precise.
> 
> According to
> https://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat#Differences_between_DEP5_a
> nd_SPDX SPDX does not have the Expat license. They do have though the "MIT
> License" (the one and only ;-), so that would imply that they're not the
> same license.

Anyone who tells you there is a One And Only MIT License is trolling you.  ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#Ambiguity_and_variants[1]

"The name 'MIT License' is potentially ambiguous. The Massachusetts Institute 
of 
Technology has been using many licenses for software since its creation; for 
example, MIT 
offers four licensing options for the FFTW[2] C source code library, one of 
which is the GPL 
v2.0[3] and the other three of which are not open-source[4]. The term 'MIT 
License' has also 
been used to refer to the *Expat License* (used for the XML parsing library 
Expat[5]) and to 
the *X11 License* (also called '*MIT/X Consortium License'*; used for X Window 
System[6] 
by the MIT X Consortium[7]). Furthermore, the 'MIT License' as published by the 
Open 
Source Initiative[8] is the same as the Expat License. Due to this differing 
use of terms, 
some prefer to avoid the name 'MIT License'. The Free Software Foundation[9] 
argues that 
the term is misleading and ambiguous, and recommends against its use.”

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat[10]

As noted in the quote above, and in the second link, the license that is most 
commonly 
called the MIT License is what is appropriately referred to as the Expat 
license in Debian.

https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit[11]

If you prefer I can open a separate bug about this issue, as it is my belief 
that Lintian 
should consider an Expat license in debian/copyright to not be a conflict with 
a MIT license 
in an AppStream metainfo.xml file.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
so...@stoutner.com

--------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License#Ambiguity_and_variants
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFTW
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expat_(library)
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_X_Consortium
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Initiative
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation
[10] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat
[11] https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/mit

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.

Reply via email to