Re: GPL-1 versus GPL-2
Mats Erik Andersson <mats.andersson@gisladisker.se> writes:
> in the course of renovating an older package, prior to
> adopting it, I ran into a calamity. On the one hand the
> source files are individually lisensed as GPL-1+, while
> on the other hand 'debian/copyright' is claiming GPL-2+,
> and Lintian is complaining about the symlink-license GPL.
> Which is the proper way of reflecting the author's choice
> of GLP-1+ as his preferred condition. A Lintian override?
There is no way to correctly reflect a license of GPL-1 or GPL-1+ in
Debian currently without including a copy of the GPL v1 in the
debian/copyright file (and overriding the resulting Lintian warnings),
because /usr/share/doc/common-licenses doesn't include the GPL v1.
See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=436105 for more
details.
In practice, what people normally do for such packages is to point to the
symlink license, document the author's intention in debian/copyright, and
then not worry about it (effectively distributing the package under the
GPL v3 for Debian's purposes since that's the license that one points to
at present if one uses the symlink). That's not ideal, but it's probably
slightly better than including a copy of the GPL v1 in each package.
My inclination is to resolve Bug#436105 by adding the GPL v1 to
common-licenses.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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