Adding MIT License to Common Licenses

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday 01 August 2008 13:58, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 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?

Thanks for that reference.  I agree a long term delta isn't a good idea.  I'll 
leave this idea alone and go arm wrestle with Lamont in private.

Scott K