Re: Consultation on license documents
Greg Wooledge dijo [Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 09:36:26AM -0400]:
> > 2. I found that each software package has a "Copyleft" document,
> > and a lot of license information is also listed in this
> > document. Therefore, I would like to ask, when the two documents
> > "license.txt" and "Copyleft" exist in the software package at the
> > same time, which one should the user take as the basis, and how to
> > deal with the situation where the declared license information of
> > the two documents is inconsistent, Which shall prevail?
>
> The term "copyleft" is used by GNU (specifically Richard Stallman, I
> believe) to describe the GNU General Public License (GPL). I've never
> seen that term used in any other context. It's certainly not the name
> of any file present in Debian packages at large.
The term might have been _coined_ by Richard Stallman, but is quite
used throughout the Free Software communities. Any license which (as
the GPL does) requires all further distributions of derivatives of the
original work under the same terms (particularly for software,
including full sources and the right to modify them) are termed
copyleft in general; non-code licenses such as the Creative Commons
(share-alike variants) are also copyleft licenses.
> > 3. If the software package only contains "Copyleft" documents, can
> > users refer to the license information declared in this document?
>
> Again, the license(s) are in the "copyright" files, one per package.
Right. I would add to your initial explanation that, having a
/usr/share/doc/PKGNAME/copyright, having any other files installed as
part of a binary package with licensing details can be considered a
bug, and only /usr/share/doc/PKGNAME/copyright should be considered
authoritative in a Debian system.
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