Modestas Vainius <modes...@vainius.eu> writes: > On the other hand, 130+ packages is not such a small number so those > licenses are still "common" just to a lesser extent. I tend not to view > "common" as "very popular" but rather "shared by multiple things". So I > wonder what are the disadvantages of including them in common-licenses? > What would Debian lose by doing so? They are supposedly DFSG free, more > than a hundred of packages share it so copyright files of 130+ binary > packages may potentially become smaller and easier to understand.
There are a few reasons why we generally lean against including licenses in common-licenses. First, it's clearer and generally better to keep legal material with the package and have the license information in a standard and reliable location. If it's in the copyright file, it's available no matter where the Debian package goes. When it refers to common-licenses, people have to go to a different location and it also relies on the package being used as part of the Debian system and hence having base-files available. Given that, the primary motivation for common-licenses is not to collect all the licenses we use but to save some space in the archive and, more importantly, on users' disks (particularly in embedded environments) for licenses that are in huge and widespread use in the archive. To take the obvious example, 19,893 binary packages in Debian refer to some version of the GPL. We don't want to include 19,893 copies of the GPL in the archive, and we don't want to install hundreds or thousands of copies of the GPL on everyone's computer, including embedded systems. This is more the problem that common-licenses was designed to solve. But secondly, base-files is a mandatory package on every Debian system, which means that if we put a license in base-files, we install it on everyone's system regardless of whether any of the packages on that system use it or not, in addition to the other drawbacks mentioned above. So the inclusion criteria, at least from my perspective, is mostly based on whether it feels just ludicrous to include separate copies of the license in every package. Here, for the record, are the usage counts for the licenses currently included in common-licenses: Apache 2.0 1119 Artistic 2285 BSD (common-licenses) 1556 GFDL (any) 875 GFDL (symlink) 389 GFDL 1.2 499 GFDL 1.3 67 GPL (any) 19893 GPL (symlink) 10116 GPL 2 9073 GPL 3 2797 LGPL (any) 7183 LGPL (symlink) 2524 LGPL 2 4679 LGPL 2.1 3189 LGPL 3 691 If I had to do it over again, I would have argued against including the GFDL. At the time, I think we expected it to be used a lot more than it was because it was FSF-blessed and the other FSF licenses are quite heavily used, but in practice it seems to be used almost exclusively by FSF projects and doesn't have much general uptake the way that the GPL and even the LGPL have had. Apart from the brand new version of the LPGL, to which people are still migrating, the GFDL family is the only family in triple digits for binary package counts. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
