Josh Triplett <[email protected]> writes: > Numerous packages use the MIT/Expat license, and currently all of those > packages need to include it in their copyright files. I'd love to see > this license added to /usr/share/common-licenses/ ; this would require a > Policy change to section 12.5 to allow.
I don't think this is a good idea. This license is extremely short, and it has a ton of minor variations, so we'll get a lot of people using it even though the exactly licensing terms of their package don't match the canonical copy. For example, it's very common to see "THE AUTHORS" replaced with a specific list of people or organizations in the license, which is a very small change that's easy for someone to miss when they know that the terms are just the Expat terms. I think the common-license infrastructure is designed for licenses that are small novels, like the GPL. For something that's just three paragraphs, putting it directly in the copyright file has a simplicity and robustness that I think outweighs any minor one-time inconvenience during packaging or a bit of additional disk space usage. (And if I could go back in time, I'd pull the BSD license from common-licenses on the same grounds.) -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
