Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Comparison of software licences

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. Mailer Diablo 20:55, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comparison of software licences

There are too many licences to go around here - how do we discriminate? Do we include zlib as well as MIT? Do we include every Microsoft EULA with even a tiny change? I just can't see this article ever being complete enough to be useful without being gigantic. Ruaraidh-dobson 15:02, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

• See also the discussion at Talk:Comparison of software licences. Uncle G 15:40, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
• You have a point, but I see software licensing as a topic in which a comparison is needed. Keep. --Snarius 16:18, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
  • Needed or no, Wikipedia cannot have an article without cited sources to demonstrate that it is not original research. To address the arguments put forward on the article's talk page, please cite some sources to demonstrate that people have compared software licences and that this article will not require original research. Uncle G 17:44, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
• Keep on Condition that only notable/ fairly common license types are compared. Knowing Is Half The Battle 19:58, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
• Delete because any comparison will be misleading. Compatibility of two licenses is dependent upon the interpretation of the license by the copyright holder. A collective work covered by two licenses may or may not be distributable, and this article cannot reliably shed any light on that situation. -Russ Nelson RussNelson 22:13, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
  • You are assuming one particular sort of comparison, namely that of saying whether one licence is legally compatible with another. Please read our comparison of filesystems. Legal compatibility with one another is only one of the ways in which software licences could be compared in an article such as this. We could compare them by publication dates, by authors, by whether they have had approval by various organizations (such as the FSF, the OSI, and so forth), (possibly) by how many softwares are licenced thereunder, and by other criteria. comparison of filesystems should give an idea of how an article such as this could be written.

    The major question is that of sources. Do sources exist from which such a comparison article can be written? A comparison article that comprises a table with two columns, "FSF approval?" and "OSI approval?", can definitely be written, using the sources that this article already cites. If we have no sources on the matter of legal compatibility, then that doesn't mean that a "comparison of" article cannot be written. It only means that the comparison article cannot have a "X compatible with Y" matrix.

    The real question to address is whether the aforementioned table is better placed in list of software licenses. Uncle G 23:37, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

• keep please these are helpful comparisons and verifiable too Yuckfoo 19:58, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.