Re: Some hard numbers on licenses used by elisp packages

[Jonas Bernoulli <jonas@bernoul.li>]

I have looked at some files and made some improvements.  We are now down
to roughly 200 packages that still need to be checked.

| License       | Count | Percent |
|---------------+-------+---------|
| GPL-3+        |  2247 |      61 |
| GPL-2+        |   614 |      17 |
| (unknown)     |   209 |       6 |
| MIT           |   169 |       5 |
| GPL-3         |    99 |       3 |
| as-is         |    72 |       2 |
| (pending)     |    66 |       2 |
| BSD-2-clause  |    43 |       1 |
| GPL-2         |    41 |       1 |
| unlicense     |    30 |       1 |
| Apache-2.0    |    24 |       1 |
| public-domain |    23 |       1 |
| BSD-3-clause  |    17 |       0 |
| WTFPL         |     9 |       0 |
| GPL-1+        |     4 |       0 |
| BSD           |     3 |       0 |
| GPL           |     2 |       0 |
| ISC           |     2 |       0 |
| LGPL          |     2 |       0 |
| AGPL-3        |     1 |       0 |
| AGPL-3+       |     1 |       0 |
| Artistic-2.0  |     1 |       0 |
| BSD-3         |     1 |       0 |
| EPL           |     1 |       0 |
| EPL-1.0       |     1 |       0 |
| LGPL-3        |     1 |       0 |
| LGPL-3+       |     1 |       0 |
| LGPL-3.0      |     1 |       0 |
| MPL-2         |     1 |       0 |
|---------------+-------+---------|
| total GNU     |  3014 |      82 |
|---------------+-------+---------|
| total         |  3686 |     100 |

Well not quite the 66 "pending" packages also have "unknown" licenses,
bit in those cases I have already contacted the maintainers.

There are a few additional ambiguous and/or otherwise problematic
licenses showing up now, but I would suggest that we concentrate on
getting the number of packages with unknown licenses down, before we
tackle those.

  Richard Stallman said:
> I propose that people pick 10 of these packages, perhaps randomly, and
> study each of the 10 by hand. [...] 10 packages is a much smaller
> task.  Small enough, I think, that there is no need to worry about
> making any special tools.  It's enough to look at the source
> files. [...]  Wha do you think of this approach?

Of course that helps, and since some people have offered to help with
that, I have now created a list of the remaining packages.  There is now
a new file, licenses-details.org in the epkg-reports [1] repository that
contains just that.

It would however be nice if the people who look into this would also
contact some authors to encourage them to properly license their code.

  Jonas

[1]: git clone https://github.com/emacsmirror/epkg-reports.git