[License-discuss] objective criteria for license evaluation

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 12/05/2012 10:23 AM, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> writes:
>> Anyone else have other suggestions for objective criteria we could
>> use? I know some folks here have been thinking about this issue for
>> some time.
> 
> Number of "forks" of software under a given license on GitHub, adjusted
> for license popularity across GitHub?  (And the equivalent calculation
> for other sites, where possible.)

That could be misleading, depending on what we want to measure.  There
are a lot of forks doing real work (either true forks, or those that do
ongoing pull requests to keep synced).

However, there are also people that fork and make one or two changes, or
none at all.  There's nothing wrong with that, it just might not be a
meaningful metric for this purpose.

Matt Flaschen