Dear FTP team, the Policy editors request your attention and a decision regarding Debian bug #883950: debian-policy: allow specifying common licenses with only the identifier. Summary of the proposal ======================= Situation ========= Debian Policy 12.5 "Copyright information" declares that: "Packages distributed under the Apache license (version 2.0), the Artistic license, the Creative Commons CC0-1.0 license, the GNU GPL (versions 1, 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), the GNU FDL (versions 1.2 or 1.3), and the Mozilla Public License (version 1.1 or 2.0) should refer to the corresponding files under /usr/share/common-licenses, [9] rather than quoting them in the copyright file." It is common practice to document copyright notices in debian/copyright in the following form when using copyright format 1.0. Files: foo.bar Copyright: 2017, Smith <foo@example.com> License: GPL-2+ License: GPL-2+ On Debian systems the full license text of the GNU General Public License 2 can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 Proposal ======== Allow the use of the short-license identifier only in the form: Files: foo.bar Copyright: 2017, Smith <foo@example.com> License: [GPL-2+] without the extra standalone paragraph which will mean exactly the same as License: GPL-2+ On Debian systems the full license text of the GNU General Public License 2 can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 in the future. Similar for other licenses under /usr/share/common-licenses. License: [GPL-2] License: [GPL-3+] License: [Apache-2.0] License: [LGPL-2+] etc. To clarify the meaning of this new short-license identifier, we intend to document it in a modified version of copyright format 1.0 which will be (most likely) released as copyright format 1.1. Especially the meaning of the + sign will be clarified. To ensure that every Debian user will have access to this documentation, copyright format 1.1 will be installed onto all Debian systems locally. The Format header would be changed to (location not final) Format: /usr/share/common-licenses/copyright-format/1.1 The intention is to reduce unnecessary boilerplate in debian/copyright by referencing licenses on the local system and thus saving developer time and also improving readability. Please report back to #883950, if you think this is an adequate proposal. Regards, Markus
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