On 10/12/12 17:23, Luis Villa wrote:
How to define "useful" objectively? Size is the obvious,
plausibly-obtainable proxy here for "useful"- "projects over X LOC" or
something like that. I suppose if you had a custom crawler that had
knowledge of git/svn/cvs/etc., you could do "projects over 5
committers" or "projects with over 100 commits" or something along
those lines. Richard suggests community size, which would be great but
is probably not computable, no matter how many people/how much money
you throw at it.
Perhaps we could have multiple criteria - either size, or being used in
> N other projects. If there were some way of detecting that. Some
modern SCMs now allow you to explicitly pull in other repos; perhaps
that could be detected.
This is important; however some licenses such as the HPND have no identified
author, but yet are deprecated.
Deprecated by *who*? :) (Note that we don't even have a "deprecated"
category right now; we've only gotten as far as "redundant with more
popular licenses.")
Well, http://opensource.org/licenses/HPND says:
"This License has been voluntarily deprecated by its author."
:-P
* has/doesn't have an explicit patent grant
- I am of the view that even if the OSI finds it impossible politically to
recommend specific licenses, it should try and get to a place where it can
recommend license features - with an explicit patent grant being in pole
position.
Any others?
Nothing so concrete. One would want the license to have been drafted
with international concerns in mind, especially if it did not have
choice-of-law. But that's much harder to spot.
As Richard points out, it is very hard to imagine how to make this
objective, but I'd encourage folks to think creatively about it.
Richard's point is a fair one :-)
I like the intuition here, but I'd like to push us to think about more
objective criteria: what does it mean to "play nicely"? Presumably
"compatible", but who determines compatibility? What does it mean? Can
that be determined objectively?
A good question. What is compatibility? It is a non-transitive relation,
such that X is compatible with Y if code from license X can be used in a
project with license Y. (If we want to pick a better term than
"compatible", I wouldn't object.)
Who determines compatibility? Aside from the well-known disagreement
about Apache 2 and GPL 2, I'm not sure (perhaps I'm naive!) that there
is much disagreement about compatibility as defined above, for popular X
and Y.
Gerv
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