Packages which state "same terms as perl itself" in d/copyright, but only refer to the Artistic license
Hi,
while revamping some old perl modules I noticed that quite a few of
these packages state in debian/copyright that "you may distribute it
under the same terms as perl itself", but then again only refer to the
Artistic license, e.g. as "the complete text of the Artistic License
can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic'."
In the Debian Perl Group's packages there seem currently 6 packages
left with this issue:
~/pkg-perl/git/packages → fgrep -li "perl itself" */debian/copyright | xargs fgrep -Li GPL
libdate-convert-perl/debian/copyright
libdbix-xmlmessage-perl/debian/copyright
libdebug-trace-perl/debian/copyright
liblingua-en-numbers-ordinate-perl/debian/copyright
liblog-tracemessages-perl/debian/copyright
libmsgcat-perl/debian/copyright
~/pkg-perl/git/packages → fgrep -li "perl itself" */debian/copyright | xargs fgrep -Li artistic
~/pkg-perl/git/packages →
There seem to be no cases of the opposite case.
I first suspected that these facts may come from Perl initially only
being licensed under the Artistic License. But to my surprise it
seems[1] vice versa: Perl 3 was only GPL and Perl 4 was the first Perl
to be dual-licensed.
[1] http://www.softpanorama.info/Scripting/Perlbook/Ch01/perl_history.shtml#Perl_heritage
So IMHO these missing GPL references in debian/copyright should be
fixed.
I also wonder if this is worth a lintian warning, especially after
I've fixed all the cases above. But then again, there may be
non-pkg-perl maintained packages with the same issue. So implementing
the lintian test just for us (via pkg-perl-tools) is probably less
useful.
Any thoughts on this?
Regards, Axel
--
,''`. | Axel Beckert <abe@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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