On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 02:14:09PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Nicholas Bamber wrote: > > As far as I know the license data in debian/copyright states what > > license Debian is distributing the package under. > Section 1.2 "Copyright information" says: > Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright > information and distribution license > While there's been some debate before about what "verbatim" means, I > suspect that most would agree that, for example, changing "1.1 or > later" to "1.2" would not be it. I would not agree with this. First and foremost, the purpose of the debian/copyright file is to notify *users of the Debian package* what their rights are. It is entirely appropriate for this file to therefore encode information about the *effective* license, rather than about the *original* license. If the Debian maintainer has opted to distribute under a "later version" clause and not pass through the permission to distribute under an old (possibly buggy) license, or if the library linking we're doing when combining this work with another in the distro means that the binaries are only distributable under a later version, this is perfectly appropriate to indicate in debian/copyright. Maintainers have done this for years already (although not universally, because it's a lot more work than just copying whatever text is in the upstream sources and letting users work out the effective rights for themselves). If someone cares about distinguishing between the upstream granted license and the effective license, that's going to require much better tooling for automating this than we have now. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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