Copyright format “License” field: grant of license, license text?
Howdy all,
Is there a place in ‘debian/copyright’ for the text granting license to
the work, separate from the text of the license itself?
For a simplified example: Package ‘foo’ has a grant of license broadly
under GPL-3+, and some files under CC-BY-SA-3.
It also has a group of files, ‘libquux/*’, to which license is granted
by some specific text:
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.
Should that text – the grant of license for those files – appear in the
‘debian/copyright’ file for the package?
It is not the license text itself (that would be the full text of the
GPL v2 and the CC By-SA v3, respectively), so it doesn't go in a
separate “License” paragraph.
There does need to be a separate “License: CC-BY-SA-3” paragraph giving
the full text of that license, but this is different from the text
*granting* the license in the work.
It is not a grant of license to the work as a whole (it only applies to
a subset of files), so it doesn't belong in the header paragraph.
Does it belong in the “Files: libquux/*” paragraph? The most logical
place would be in the “License” field of that paragraph, separate from
the standalone “License” paragraph::
Files: *
Copyright: […]
License: GPL-3+
Files: resources/*
Copyright: […]
License: CC-BY-SA-3
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.
Lintian no longer agrees that's good, though. It complains with the
warning “dep5-copyright-license-name-not-unique”::
W: dep5-copyright-license-name-not-unique
N:
N: This paragraph defines an already defined license.
N:
N: According to the specification, short license names are required to be
N: unique within a single copyright file.
N:
N: Refer to
N: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/ for
N: details.
On the face of it, the warning is a false positive in this case: the
stand-alone “License: CC-BY-SA-3” paragraph is the first and only
*definition* of that license in the file. The earlier “License
CC-BY-SA-3” field is not a definition of the license, it is showing the
text which explicitly *grants* license.
I can see that's not feasible to teach Lintian to distinguish, given the
current ‘debian/copyright’ format definition. But I don't want to just
override the Lintian check; it's good to catch *true* positives that
violate the copyright format in the manner described.
What is the correct solution for this? Can we have all that information
in the places I've described? Can we have them elsewhere in the file, in
a format easier for Lintian to check?
--
\ “Our products just aren't engineered for security.” —Brian |
`\ Valentine, senior vice-president of Microsoft Windows |
_o__) development, 2002 |
Ben Finney
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