Hello As a member of the new DFSG team, I would like to restart the discussion from September 2023..
The issue at hand is the inclusion of additional license texts in the
base-files package.
In doing so, I would like to continue Russ Albery’s proposal [0].
Licenses will be included in common-licenses if they meet all of the
following criteria:
* The license is DFSG-free.
* Exactly the same license wording is used by all works covered by it.
* The license applies to at least 100 source packages in Debian.
* The license text is longer than 25 lines.
It also lists various reasons why it makes sense to include additional
license texts.
* Including long legal texts in debian/copyright, particularly if one
wants to format them for copyright-format, is tedious and annoying and
doesn't benefit our users in any significant way, and therefore we
should include as many licenses as possible in common-licenses to spare
people that work.
* common-licenses consumes disk space on every installed Debian system of
any size, and therefore should be kept small to avoid wasting system
resources.
The above reasons also make it easier for the DFSG team to review the
packages.
Even on our own systems, the licenses in question meet these criteria.
[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/09/msg00055.html
--
Mechtilde Stehmann
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