Bug#633994: debian-policy: confusion over what the license information in the copyright file actually means

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 02:14:09PM -0500, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

>> 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.

I agree as far as this.

> 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.

For the former (license upgrades), the Debian maintainer should also
patch the source files to make the change, right?  If that's done,
then I agree that it seems reasonable.

For the latter (license explanation), I also agree it's reasonable.
"A verbatim copy" has always been a somewhat problematic phrase
because in practice it's not the words that matter but the meaning.
When describing the license of binaries, of course it is more valuable
to document the actual license the user has than the separate licenses
of the components used to build it.

But note that the case at hand doesn't seem to be fall under either of
those two cases, and the example copyright file actually keeps the
original "1.1 or later" text (and probably the document includes an "GNU
Free Documentation License 1.1" appendix but not a GFDL-1.2 appendix,
making the GFDL-1.1 terms potentially relevant).

> 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).

I'd be interested in an example if you have one handy.

> 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.

debian/copyright describes the license users get, while "egrep -R -e
(opyright|icense|ublic)" in the source package gives the upstream
granted license.  So I think we're doing fine on that front. :)

Thanks for the useful clarifications.
Jonathan