Ahmad,
On Thursday, February 6, 2025 2:33:13 PM MST Ahmad Khalifa wrote:
> On 06/02/2025 00:07, Soren Stoutner wrote:
> > Ahmad,
> >
> > (KMail hit me with this bug again, so I am resending this from
> > Thunderbird. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1057758)
> They all came through complete. Perhaps the bug is in the "Sent" box only.
> This is the first one:
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2025/02/msg00045.html
That’s interesting. Perhaps the bug behavior changed a bit with the KDE 6 transition.
> My understanding was that keeping the special short name 'public-domain'
> is a special case from section 7.1.1 here:
> https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
>
> I could separate it out as it is usually easier to manage the Files
> stanzas when they're slim.
That is a preference that you are certainly free to follow. Personally, I find it more difficult to read a debian/copyright file if the text of the license is sometimes with a file stanza and sometimes at the bottom. As you have multiple different public domain declarations, if you put them at the bottom of the file you will need to have different public-domain~versions, as described in 7.1.1.
"When the License field in a stanza has the short name public-domain, the remaining lines of the field must explain exactly what exemption the corresponding files for that stanza have from default copyright restrictions."
> > > > Files: inc/gmp.bi
> > > >
> > > > bootstrap/inc/gmp.bi
> > > >
> > > > Copyright: The FreeBASIC Development Team
> > > >
> > > > 1991-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> > > >
> > > > License: GPL-2+, and GPL-2+ or LGPL-3+
> > >
> > > And this is one of the occurrences where the original was A OR B, so now
> > > it says "A AND (A OR B)", which again looks silly.
> >
> > I recently did something like this:
> >
> > https://salsa.debian.org/debian/maildrop/-/blob/master/debian/copyright?
> > ref_type=heads#L68
>
> Oh this works and lintian doesn't complain about parenthesis!
> Section 7.2 in that copyright format has this obscure comma based
> format. More natural language, but slightly ambiguous.
>
> But are you also saying to keep the AND/OR and not squash them down?
The LGPL-3+ cannot be subsumed into the GPL-2+ without turning it into the GPL-3+. So, I think the only way to accurately state what happened is:
License: GPL-2+ and (GPL-2+ or LGPL-3+)
This says that the original file was available under the GPL-2+ or the LGPL-3+. The FreeBASIC Development Team decided to utilize the file under the GPL-2+ option, and then licensed their code translation under the GPL-2+. This means that the current version of the file is only available under the GPL-2+.
Alternatively, you could do:
License: GPL-2+
Comment:
Free Software Foundation licensed the original file was under the GPL-2+ or
the LGPL-3+. The FreeBASIC Development Team decided to utilize the file
under the GPL-2+ option, and then licensed their code translation under the
GPL-2+.
> > > > Files: inc/X11/*
> > > >
> > > > bootstrap/inc/X11/*
> > > >
> > > > Copyright: The FreeBASIC Development Team
> > > >
> > > > 1987-1998 The Open Group
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > 2008-2010 Red Hat, Inc.
> > > >
> > > > License: GPL-2+ and HPND-sell-variant and MIT and MIT-HP and X11
> > >
> > > Here is an example where I got tired and called it in. No way anyone
> > > wants to separate X11 headers for individual use, so I lumped them all
> > > up under one impossible set of licenses. I also avoided several
> > > variations of HPND where the variation is the copyright holder name only
> > > and used the generic "copyright holder" language from SPDX.org.
> >
> > Files: inc/X11/*
> > bootstrap/inc/X11/*
> > Copyright: The FreeBASIC Development Team
> > 1987-1998 The Open Group
> > 1987-1997 Digital Equipment Corporation
> > 1987 Apollo Computer Inc.
> > 1989-1995 GROUPE BULL
> > 1989-2002 Hewlett-Packard Company
> > 1990-2011 Oracle and/or its affiliates
> > 1993-1994 NCR Corporation
> > 1995 Kaleb S. KEITHLEY
> > 1995 Jon Tombs
> > 1995 Network Computing Devices
> > 1995 XFree86 Inc.
> > 1997 Silicon Graphics Computer Systems, Inc
> > 1999 Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@clark.net>
> > 2000-2003 Keith Packard
> > 2000 Compaq Computer Corporation
> > 2000 SuSE, Inc.
> > 2003-2008 Jamey Sharp, Josh Triplett
> > 2004 The Unichrome Project
> > 2006 Intel Corporation
> > 2007-2008 Peter Hutterer
> > 2008-2010 Red Hat, Inc.
> > License: GPL-2+ and HPND-sell-variant and MIT and MIT-HP and X11
> >
> > This section says that “all of the files in these directories are
> > licensed under GPL-2+ and HPND-sell-variant and MIT and MIT-HP and X11
> > and if you want to use any of these files you need to comply with all of
> > these licenses. Each one of these files is copyright by one or more of
> > the copyright entries. If, for some reason, you want to relicense all
> > of these files under a different license, you need need permission to
> > from all of these copyright holders. However, if you only want to
> > relicense one of these files, you will need to check the file header to
> > see who ownes the copyright to ask their permission.”
> >
> > This would be fine if that accurately described the licensing of the
> > files in that directory, but it doesn’t. Rather, each of the files is
> > licensed under only a subset of those licenses.
> >
> > To handle this correctly, you need to group the files by the licenses
> > they use. Which is insanely time consuming. It took me three days (on
> > and off) to do this debian/copyright:
> >
> > https://salsa.debian.org/debian/courier/-/blob/master/debian/copyright?
> > ref_type=heads
> >
> > lrc might help automate the process a bit (I see below you use it, but I
> > include it here in case some other reader of the conversation is curious).
> >
> > https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/licenserecon
>
> If I may debate a little here...
> You're quite right in that the accurate picture is to group the files
> according to their copyrights and licenses. And even to separate out the
> HPND licenses into their verbatim copyright holder versions: HPND-DEC,
> HPND-Keith, HPND-SGI, HPND-HP, ...
>
> But in practice, what's wrong with adding licenses, even if they're
> superfluous?
> If the goal here is to protect debian from any incorrect usage due to
> debian's declaration of copyright on distributed software, isn't it safe
> to pile on more licenses? Similar to how we lump up several copyright
> holders over multiple files.
> It only makes it "inconvenient" to use the files without reading their
> individual license in the rare case that someone wants to fish out a
> single file and lump it with another non-free license.
>
> In other words, isn't it safer to add an extra license to a whole
> directory than to forget a license on a single file?
>
> Of course, this is partially motivated by the objective to reduce the
> maintenance effort here, but can't help wonder why no other distribution
> system has this level of granularity and still thrives (fedora, flatpak,
> ubuntu, ...).
If that were the case, then each debian/copyright file would just contain one stanza.
Files: *
Copyright: All the copyright statements in the package.
License: All the licenses in the package.
This is counter to the design of DEP-5. If you feel strongly about this, you are welcome to propose an update to DEP-5, but I think it is accurate to say that Debian’s current practice is that the license listed under a files stanza should apply equally to each file in that stanza.
> Reading courier's copyright and seeing lots of similar challenges, but
> I'm surprised its aclocal.m4 file has a separate license.
> My understanding was that you can relicense libtool's generated files to
>
> whatever license the main program uses due to this snippet:
> > # As a special exception to the GNU General Public License, if you
> > # distribute this file as part of a program or library that is built
> > # using GNU Libtool, you may include this file under the same
> > # distribution terms that you use for the rest of that program.
I think you are correct, as long as the aclocal.m4 is only licensed under the above text. However, these aclocal.m4 files contain many other copyright and licensing claims beyond just the GPL-2+~Libtool-with-exception. For example, search through the following file for each time the word “copyright” appears.
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/courier/-/blob/master/aclocal.m4?ref_type=heads
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org
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