Bug#284340: Please remove reference to UC in BSD license
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> 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.
I have now, much later, done that research, or at least part of it. 1,556
packages in Debian currently reference /usr/share/doc/common-licenses/BSD.
While I'm sure many of those actually contain UC-licensed material, I
suspect many of them are in error. However, that's 1,556 packages that
would be made instantly buggy by removing the license.
I therefore propose proceeding as follows:
1. Add a new Lintian warning asking people to stop using the
common-licenses link for the BSD license and instead include the
license directly in debian/copyright. As we've discussed in the past,
this is the best course of action for short and simple licenses,
particularly ones that can have some wording difference. The BSD
license isn't long enough to warrant the extra indirection. The
warning can also mention that the license isn't appropriate for code
that isn't owned by the University of California.
2. Apply the patch to Policy included below, which removes this license
from the list of licenses we tell people to reference from
/usr/share/common-licenses and explains why.
3. Based on the Lintian results, watch the count of packages using this
reference and, if it gets low enough, clean up the rest with a mass bug
filing and then drop the file from base-files.
Any further discussion? I'm also looking for seconds for the Policy patch
below:
diff --git a/policy.sgml b/policy.sgml
index 87b9795..02d6f8d 100644
--- a/policy.sgml
+++ b/policy.sgml
@@ -9227,14 +9227,13 @@ END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
</p>
<p>
- Packages distributed under the UCB BSD license, the Apache
- license (version 2.0), the Artistic license, the GNU GPL
- (version 2 or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), and the
- GNU FDL (versions 1.2 or 1.3) should refer to the corresponding
- files under <file>/usr/share/common-licenses</file>,<footnote>
+ Packages distributed under the Apache license (version 2.0), the
+ Artistic license, the GNU GPL (version 2 or 3), the GNU LGPL
+ (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), and the GNU FDL (versions 1.2 or 1.3)
+ should refer to the corresponding files
+ under <file>/usr/share/common-licenses</file>,<footnote>
<p>
In particular,
- <file>/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD</file>,
<file>/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0</file>,
<file>/usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic</file>,
<file>/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2</file>,
@@ -9244,7 +9243,14 @@ END-INFO-DIR-ENTRY
<file>/usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-3</file>,
<file>/usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL-1.2</file>, and
<file>/usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL-1.3</file>
- respectively.
+ respectively. The University of California BSD license is
+ also included in <package>base-files</package> as
+ <file>/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD</file>, but given the
+ brevity of this license, its specificity to code whose
+ copyright is held by the Regents of the Univesrity of
+ California, and the frequency of minor wording changes, its
+ text should be included in the copyright file rather than
+ referencing this file.
</p>
</footnote> rather than quoting them in the copyright
file.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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