I recently came across this bug report while working on cleaning up Lintian errors on qtwebengine-opensource-src.
The summarized version of the problem is that the file was originally licensed under a non-DFSG-free license, but was later changed by Unicode to be under a DFSG-free licence.
Google has some discussion of the issue here:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/google-breakpad/issues/detail?id=270
Based on what was documented, they changed the license of the file in their repository here:
LLVM has recently changed the license of the code in their repository for the version 16 release:
https://llvm.org/doxygen/ConvertUTF_8cpp_source.html
The text of the DFSG-free license can be found at:
https://www.unicode.org/license.txt
The result is that some of the packages in Debian still have the problematic code listed in the header, but others do not.
Packages with the non-DFSG-free license (correct Lintian positive):
binaryen
desmume
funguloids
libdbd-odbc-perl
llvm-toolchain-9
llvm-toolchain-13
llvm-toolchain-14
llvm-toolchain-15
opencollada
parser
spring
tla
unshield
zeek
Packages with a DFSG-free license (false Lintian positive):
firefox
firefox-esr
llvm-toolchain-snapshot
qt6-webengine
qtwebengine-opensource-src
thunderbird
It is easy to tell which packages have the problematic license because they contain the words “products supporting”, which phrase is not contained in the acceptable license.
I propose that the Lintian check be modified to only flag files that contain “products supporting”. Once that change is made, I would be happy to work with the various maintainers of the problematic packages to help them get the correct licensing into their upstream files.
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@stoutner.com
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