Bug#645696: lintian: missing-license-text-in-dep5-copyright is too strict when considering "X+" licenses
Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> The issue isn't whether they're the same license, it's whether they can
> be incorporated into the same License: paragraph.
Those seem like the same issues.
> As I pointed out already, your argument is inconsistent - "MPL or GPL or
> LGPL" allows relicensing as well, but DEP5 requires that we group
> together the uses of each component MPL, GPL, LGPL, separately. Why
> treat "GPL2+" differently?
Because you can't do the same thing that you can do with that disjunction,
because there's no way to group the "+" part independently that makes
sense.
> It's logically equivalent to "GPL2 or GPL3 or GPL4 or GPL5 ....".[1]
Except that you can't write License stanzas for GPL4 or GPL5, so in
essence you have to treat GPL-2+ as a distinct license, since there's no
other good way to accurately represent it. It's a similar case to the GPL
v2 with an OpenSSL exception.
> Why do you think separate paragraphs for GPL2 and GPL2+ is a good idea?
I said why I think it's a good idea in my previous message. I understand
that you disagree, but I'm not convinced.
> Going back to the previous example, this sort of text:
> | This program is free software; you can redistribute it
> | and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
> | Public License as published by the Free Software
> | Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
> | opinion) any later version.
> should not be in the License: paragraph. It is not a summary of GPL2,
> nor does it represent what it says, and it is *not* a license. Proper
> licenses describe conditions for doing things to an *unspecified* set of
> subject materials ("The Software" or equiv in legalese); by contrast,
> the above text is preamble describing which licenses apply to which
> particular materials, which would normally be on a file
> header. Sometimes these things are merged, as is the case with shorter
> licenses, but with legally-written license documents, they are
> separated.
I think this is an unuseful bit of nitpicking. It captures the licensing
information for the software, and would contain the full license text
except that you're allowed to replace that full license text with a
pointer to common-licenses.
At the end of the day, the reason why you do it this way is because that's
what DEP5 says that you should do, and the arguments for changing DEP5 for
everyone are not sufficiently compelling (in large part because they
create other problems, like how to not lose the "+" part of the
description of the license).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: