[License-discuss] objective criteria for license evaluation

Karl Fogel kfogel at red-bean.com
Thu Dec 6 23:35:07 UTC 2012


Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> writes:
>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.

Of course.  I meant that as a direction to look in, not as a literal
suggestion of methodology.  By number of forks at GitHub, I meant "look
at the forks, using some kind of intelligent criteria, statistical
methods, etc".

This is non-trivial work, of course.  Which is why it is so hard to get
good stats on license popularity and why the notion is rife with
fundamental definitional questions.



More information about the License-discuss mailing list