Re: DEP-5: Please clarify the meaning of "same licence and share copyright holders"
Noah Slater <nslater@tumbolia.org> writes:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 06:40:46PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think you have to go back most of the way to Sam's original proposal.
> Is there any reason a Comment field wouldn't suffice?
I guess it's a matter of taste, but I think there's a significant
difference between having a structure for fields for the things that one
wants to be formal about and requiring that the entire file be in a
formal structure with an escape field. To use Comment, one has to
indent the material and add periods for blank lines and whatnot. All of
that is quite possible, but it doesn't make it more readable and it
feels pointless.
For example, the OpenAFS copyright file has the following in it, which I
don't think fits into any of the existing fields but which I think all
belongs in the copyright file.
| The upstream source has been repackaged to remove the
| src/packaging/MacOS and src/platform/DARWIN directories and the files
| src/afs/sysctl.h and src/util/fstab.c. These directories and files
| are only used for building on MacOS X and contained content covered by
| the Apple Public Source License 2.0. This license is not considered
| DFSG-free. Since the repackaging was needed anyway, the WINNT
| directory was also dropped, reducing the size of the upstream tarball
| by 8MB.
|
| The upstream openafs-src and openafs-doc tarballs have been combined
| into one source tarball.
|
| The openafs-doc package contains the OpenAFS documentation as
| distributed by the OpenAFS project, which does not include the
| original source. These documents were originally created using TeX
| internally by Transarc, the original authors of AFS. By the time that
| AFS was released as free software by IBM after acquiring Transarc, the
| original source could no longer be found. It has apparently been lost
| over the years.
|
| Although these HTML and PDF files would not normally be considered
| source, they're all that's available until they can be rewritten and
| updated in some better format. They have been released under the IBM
| Public License Version 1.0 (included below), the same license as the
| rest of OpenAFS.
|
| Normally, this documentation could not be included in Debian without
| being accompanied by the original TeX source and build tools under
| DFSG#2, but under the circumstances, these files essentially are the
| source, as they're all that anyone has.
(Watch, someone is going to say that parts of this should go into
README.source again and ask me to explain yet one more time why I think
that's the wrong place and the provenance of the *.orig.tar.gz file
belongs in debian/copyright.)
Also, one of the things that I'd like before I can really wholeheartedly
support it is a format that will work equally well for the *upstream*
LICENSE file so that I don't have to repeat this work or not use a
computer-parsable format for packages where I'm also upstream. The
escape clause of allowing free-form text would help a LOT for that,
since for upstream I have other formatting requirements.
Right now, it feels like the proposal leaves out people who put extra
attention to the overview and high-level human-readable concepts for the
copyright file as opposed to mechanical reproduction of copyrights on
individual source files. There's no way to explain what the license of
the generated binaries are. There's nothing but a generic Comment field
to explain subtleties of license interaction or source provenance.
There's a lot of push-back in these threads towards tedious reproduction
of multiple copyright notices, but it feels like not much attention
given to what Debian really legally needs to state (licenses that apply
to the *binary* package) or a consideration of what the overall point of
the file is.
I'm generally a fan of a computer-readable syntax for the file. You'll
find that I use variations of the current proposal for many of my
packages. But it doesn't feel quite right still; it feels like it still
has the wrong balance for something that I'd be entirely happy to
support and use.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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