Re: Fixing old-fsf-address-in-copyright-file

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 05:37:08PM +1100, Ben Finney a écrit :
> 
> If we distribute a package with ‘debian/copyright’ so that it
> deliberately differs from upstream in this regard, are we not
> violating policy §12.5 “Every package must be accompanied by a
> verbatim copy of its copyright and distribution license in the file
> `/usr/share/doc/<package>/copyright'.”?

Hi Ben,

I think that this paragraph refers to the full text of the licence, for which
the GPL version 2 has an exception that allows debian/copyright to point only
to /usr/share/common-licenses. Of course, one can argue that this does not
solve the problem, since /usr/share/common-license does not contain the old GPL
version 2, but the FSF did not increment its version number for the address
change, therefore I do not think that we are doing wrong.

So I think that the GPL is a double exception. For the license that are not
listed in §12.5, the requirement of verbatim copy would indeed disallow mending
any contact address.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan