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Re: Proposal: changes to summary guidelines



MJ Ray wrote:
> 2) The first sentence clearly states the full name of the licence, the
> version number and any software packaged or ITP'd for debian that is
> under that licence, with links as appropriate.

While I do agree that debian-legal should not be reviewing licenses
except in the context of evaluating whether a given piece of software is
Free[1], I don't think that a particular piece of software in question
should be mentioned in the summary itself, for several reasons:

* It singles out a particular package, which I believe will raise _more_
accusations of vigilante license analysis, not less.

* Analyzing the license with a particular package in mind may cause a
summary to only be valid for one particular package.  *License*
summaries should analyze the license itself, in the absence of
additional permissions, restrictions, exceptions, or other changes
granted in a particular application of that license.  When reviewing a
particular package for possible inclusion in main, we can always base
that review on an existing license summary, and then reevaluate the
conclusions of that summary as necessary based on the particulars of the
application of that license.

This is not to say that licenses should be analyzed in a vacuum.
However, license summaries are much less useful if they are only
applicable in a single case, or if major parts of the license analysis
are omitted because they don't apply in that particular case.

Note that I do agree with the first two parts of that summary guideline:
the full name and version number of the license should be mentioned at
the top.

[1] (unless someone specifically requests feedback on a license)

- Josh Triplett

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