Surveying open source licenses
Surveying open source licenses
Posted Apr 19, 2013 13:38 UTC (Fri) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613)Parent article: Surveying open source licenses
> Walter agreed that his source data is dirty, but pointed out that the real question is how to get better data.
While by no means perfect, using data from the Debian snapshot archive ( http://snapshot.debian.org ) should be significantly better than the Freecode (aka Freshmeat) data. It contains all packages that has been in Debian since 2005 (including unstable and experimental which follows upstream versions fairly closely), and includes a compiled copyright file for all of them.
While by no means perfect, using data from the Debian snapshot archive ( http://snapshot.debian.org ) should be significantly better than the Freecode (aka Freshmeat) data. It contains all packages that has been in Debian since 2005 (including unstable and experimental which follows upstream versions fairly closely), and includes a compiled copyright file for all of them.
The easy way would be to just download the debian source package diffs (*.debian.diff.gz and *.debian.tar.*) and extract the debian/copyright file. Alternatively you could grab the full source packages and run Ninka on the source code to get more complete data (before DEP-5 some copyright files only contained the copyright that the complete project was released under, eg "GPLv2" rather than "GPLv2, GPLv2+, BSD-3, BSD-2").