Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
The duplicate licences situation is getting rather silly... We don't
include each variation for licences that vary only by the copyright
holder (if we did, we'd need a zillion new GPL-2s and BSDs, but instead
they just use <placeholder>s), and we don't care about whitespace
variations.
<snip>
I'll refer to the MIT license as the one in ${PORTDIR}/licenses,
although I'm sure it exists in roughly the same form under some other
names as well.
The reasons that this system was chosen were correctness and
maintainability. Many of these essentially use the good old MIT license
with various companies' and/or individuals' copyrights at the top, as
you have stated. However, the MIT license does refer to the copyrights
within the license script itself, and many of the licenses have been
slightly altered to include a company's name directly. I'm no lawyer,
but to me this means that the license does indeed include the
copyright. (Note that I'm not intricately familiar with other licenses
that often have copyrights associated, so I don't know if MIT is
unique). If this isn't correct, I'd be very happy to switch all the
packages that use various forms of the MIT license over to it instead
and you can blissfully ignore the next paragraph. However, I'd rather
be on the safe/correct side than save a few MB that have to be
downloaded once.
Now, that splinters the licenses a good amount already, and thus
maintenance becomes an issue. If one half of the licenses are unique,
and we only keep unique ones, packages start depending on other licenses
in a spaghetti-like fashion. We can't just go ahead and change any
given license since it will mess up other packages dependent on that
license. Like good programming practice, I would argue that less is not
necessarily better.
Although I'm happy to take suggestions, my warning is to think from the
maintainer's perspective while proposing. That doesn't mean I'll whine
and say go away, but rather that I'll expect you to provide some
reasonable thought about maintainability, and possibly, like above, some
data to help us out. To me, the argument first comes down to whether or
not my thoughts in the first paragraph are valid.
Joshua Baergen
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