Re: [gentoo-dev] Duplicate licences

[Joshua Baergen]

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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