Bug#284340: Please remove reference to UC in BSD license

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

package debian-policy
user debian-policy@packages.debian.org
retitle 284340 Remove reference to UC in BSD license or remove license
usertag 284340 = normative discussion
tags 284340 -wontfix
thanks

This bug proposed two changes: first, remove the specific reference to the
University of California from the BSD license in common-licenses, and
second, add several other similar licenses (two-clause BSD, Expat, and
X11).

I'm rejecting the second change on the grounds recently discussed on the
debian-policy list in several other bugs about license files, namely that
the purpose of the common-licenses directory is to save archive space for
long and complex licenses and these licenses are all short and simple to
include in debian/copyright.  Furthermore, these licenses frequently have
slightly different wording or embed different copyright holder names in
the license text, meaning that correctly referring to a shared central
copy is tricky and won't be possible for as many packages as it might
first appear.

However, the first change in this bug is still relevant, and there doesn't
appear to be another open bug on this issue.  The current BSD license in
common-licenses is not particularly useful since it specifically lists the
University of California as the copyright holder and therefore can only be
used to refer to UC-licensed code, not anything else under the same
license.  That specific copyright holder should probably either be removed
or the whole license should be removed from common-licenses.  My
preference would be the latter, but we'd first need to find any packages
that refer to the file and add the license text to the packages in
question.

If someone would tackle that research, that would be very helpful.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>