Le Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 01:26:45PM +0200, Carsten Hey a écrit : > > Shouldn't it be mentioned in the licenses description that the expat > license sometimes wrongly is referred to as MIT license?
Hi Carsten, I wonder if the tradition of using the “Expat” name to refer unambiguously to one of the variants of the “MIT” license is widespread or Debian-specific. I see no mention of the Expat license in the lists from Fedora or SPDX™, but Expat is mentionned in Wikipedia's MIT license page, and on the FSF website. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing http://spdx.org/licenses/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Expat I think that the DEP should not fall in the trap of trying to make some extensive license classification. We actually removed most of what made the short name parseable during the off-line preparative work, and I will prehaps go further and propose the removal of the description of the version semantics, that is for instance: GPL-2 and GPL-3 would be two separate short names, not two version of the GPL short name. Ontologies and license metadata are probably better in the scope of another document. If it provides ‘MIT’ as a keyword, and the full text of the MIT license in annex, then it will be clear what ‘MIT’ means in the context of the DEP. Interstinly, SPDX has not yet made up their minds about the MIT license: http://spdx.org/book/export/html/2548 (Title with no additional content at the time this email is written). It suggests that it would be better to discuss the issue with them, given the potential impact of their work, before making our final decision of what we call MIT, or if we will avoid MIT as a short name. By reference or directly, we will definitely need to provide to the readers the full text of the licenses for which we provide a short name in the DEP. Now, for the BSD: > Since Berkley removed the advertising clause from their published code > (but obviously could do this not for code they do not own the copyright) > referring to the original BSD license just as "BSD" seems to be > imprecise, I would prefer BSD-4. Especially the explanation should > mention that BSD is the original 4-clause variant. On Debian > /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD even is a 3-clause BSD license. > > Counting from one to four is more easy than remembering which licenses > FreeBSD and TNF use nowadays, we should at least consider adding these > numbers to the licenses description and maybe also make BSD-2 > respectively BSD-3 aliases for FreeBSD and NetBSD. For the variants of the BSD license that contain specific names in their text, for instance in the non-endorsement clause, or in the derivation claim of the NetBSD license, I think that it not possible to use the same keyword for derived licenses. Said differently, if a work is not copyright of the Regents of the UCB, it is not licensed under the BSD license. This is also the way taken by Debian, as the BSD license will eventually be removed from /usr/share/common-licenses/, and our Policy has been modified to stop allowing to refer to this directory instead of quoting the full text. This said, it would be a waste to lose the information that a work has a license that is identical to the BSD license, except that some names have been changed. I think that we can implement this by a ‘similar to’ keyword, and providing in annex a template that must be matched for the keyword to be used. For intance: File: pinaillette/tartempion.c pinaillette/tartempion.h Copyright: 2012 Ulysse Capillo <[email protected]>. All rights reserved. License: Capillo, similar to BSD Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met: . * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * Neither the name of the Pinaillette nor the name of Ulysse Capillo may be used to endorse or promote product derived from this software without specific prior written permission. . THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE REGENTS AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY […] Since I do not think that BSD-3 and BSD-4 could be used for anything else than BSD unix, and since BSD-2 would be difficult to disambiguate between the FreeBSD license (generic) and the NetBSD license (specific because of the derivation claim). I think that it is simpler to refer to the license by the name of their project, and to use a ‘similar to’ syntax when their text have been used as templates to create a very similar license for another work. Note that under these assumptions, not work is anymore licensed under the 4-clause BSD license: if it could have been labelled BSD-4, then its clause 3 has been cancelled by the University of California, Berkeley. For the sake of the reference, here is a link to each license: BSD with advertisement clause: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license.html BSD after removal of clause 3: http://www.netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html#berkeley License of NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html#default License of FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html License of OpenBSD: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/share/misc/license.template?rev=1.2;content-type=text%2Fplain ISC license: http://www.isc.org/software/license (differ by an ‘and/or’). If consensus converges on using a ‘similar to’ keyword, I will submit a patch. Have a nice sunday, -- Charles -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
