Niko Tyni <ntyni@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 04:46:44PM +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
>
>> Files: libquux/*
>> Copyright: […]
>> License: GPL-2 or CC-BY-SA-3
>> You may modify and/or redistribute this work under the terms of
>> either the GPL version 2 or later, or the Creative Commons
>> Attribution Share-Alike license version 3.
>>
>> License: CC-BY-SA-3
>> THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS
>> CREATIVE COMMONS PUBLIC LICENSE ("CCPL" OR "LICENSE"). THE WORK
>> IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW.
>> […]
>>
>> That makes sense to me: we have the grant of license where it applies to
>> the specific files, and we have the license text itself in a stand-alone
>> paragraph.
>
> FWIW, this is what I use for the perl package (which has one of the longer
> copyright files), but it always felt a bit like stretching the rules.
> I've seen the newish lintian warnings too but haven't gotten around to
> doing anything about them yet.
>
> The style reads well for humans but I can see it's not ideal for
> machine parsing.
>
> I'd love to have a "right" place for verbatim license grants.
I've run into this issue in my packages as well. I have always
interpreted (and used) the 'License:' header to mean the license grant
text together with the license text, rather than only the license text.
That may just have been a misunderstanding.
I believe the license grant is just as important as the license text.
The license text itself does not mean anything related to a package
unless there is a grant relating the project source code to a particular
license. This text can look the same, but for GPL it isn't: the license
grant typically refer to a particular GPL version but also includes text
such as "or (at your option) any later version". That grant text is
critical to determining the actual license of a package. Code under
GPLv2 and GPLv2+ have different properties.
I prefer to clarify that 'License:' is intended to hold the license
grant text together with the license text itself (or a pointer for the
common license texts).
Alternatively, a 'Grant:' keyword?
/Simon
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