#1009343 please consider adding Boost-1.0 and Expat to /usr/share/common-licenses

Package:
base-files
Source:
base-files
Description:
Debian base system miscellaneous files
Submitter:
Daniel Kahn Gillmor
Date:
2023-04-29 14:39:05 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
#1009343#5
Date:
2022-04-12 03:41:16 UTC
From:
To:
Expat and Boost-1.0 are both fairly common licenses in debian.  I
believe they are both well-defined, stable, and reasonably
well-understood variants of the MIT family of licenses.

https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/ even
explicitly recommends that software with an "MIT" license that matches
the Expat terms should instead refer to Expat.

It would seem reasonable to include both of these licenses in
/usr/share/common-licenses/ to discourage adoption of other
less-well-known variants in the MIT family.

Boost has the advantage over "Expat" of being explicitly included in the
SPDX listing with a short name of "BSL-1.0":

https://spdx.org/licenses/

while Expat doesn't get its own identifier in that list, but instead has
the discouraged "MIT".

For reference, here's Boost 1.0:


from https://www.boost.org/users/license.html and https://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt
----------
Boost Software License - Version 1.0 - August 17th, 2003

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization
obtaining a copy of the software and accompanying documentation covered by
this license (the "Software") to use, reproduce, display, distribute,
execute, and transmit the Software, and to prepare derivative works of the
Software, and to permit third-parties to whom the Software is furnished to
do so, all subject to the following:

The copyright notices in the Software and this entire statement, including
the above license grant, this restriction and the following disclaimer,
must be included in all copies of the Software, in whole or in part, and
all derivative works of the Software, unless such copies or derivative
works are solely in the form of machine-executable object code generated by
a source language processor.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT
SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS OR ANYONE DISTRIBUTING THE SOFTWARE BE LIABLE
FOR ANY DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
----------


And here's Expat:

  from http://www.jclark.com/xml/copying.txt
---------- Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ---------- Thanks for maintaining base-files in debian!
#1009343#10
Date:
2022-09-22 08:02:08 UTC
From:
To:
I second this request. I have noticed that many scripts are licensed
under MIT/Expat. It would be nice to have the MIT license included in
the common licenses. This will also have the added benefit of not
copying it verbatim into the debian/copyright file.

#1009343#15
Date:
2022-10-03 22:02:50 UTC
From:
To:
reassign 1009343 debian-policy
thanks

El 12/4/22 a las 5:41, Daniel Kahn Gillmor escribió:

This kind of requests should be handled by the policy group first, as
explained in the base-files FAQ. I'm reassigning the bug.

Thanks.