Adding MIT License to Common Licenses

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 10:41:15AM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> The current [1]'permissive' license in common-licenses is BSD.  It has some 
> issues and while quite common, is not, I think an ideal permissive license to 
> use when one is looking for a license in that category.  The [2] MIT license 
> is reasonably common and, IMO, a better choice for new projects.

> I would like to add it, and could just do so, but thought it deserved some 
> discussion first.  The text I would add can be found at [3] opensource.org.

> I'm specifically doing this now because of some helper scripts I want to get 
> added to the Postfix package that I'd prefer to license MIT and Lamont would 
> prefer something in common-licenses.  This seemed like the approach that 
> would be helpful to the most people.

Is this a point on which it's useful to diverge from Debian?  I know that
Lamont tries to maintain one postfix package for Ubuntu and Debian rather
than two, so if Debian doesn't pick up the MIT license in their base-files
package, we wind up with a delta between the two for just the license text
(or for your scripts, if this becomes a reason not to include them in the
package).

Debian has already considered whether the MIT license should be added to
common-licenses:

   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=284340#34

Wouldn't it be better to carry the license in the postfix copyright file,
than to have to add this as a delta between Debian and Ubuntu in both the
base-file and postfix packages?

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org