Bug#487201:
Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> The cost of the initial setup means that people don't do this in
> practise. I have not come across a single debian/copyright file with the
> full MPL text in it. Having a unified shared package for licenses makes
> this a lot easier.
I think this has more to do with the fact that most work covered by the
MPL is covered by multiple licenses, there are questions as to whether the
MPL is even a free software license, and the maintainers of some such
packages have stated that they don't consider the MPL to be a license in
effect for Debian's purposes. I believe that is, for example, the reason
why the MPL is not included in the iceweasel debian/copyright file. (In
fact, I suspect most of the reference rather than inclusion of the MPL is
because people are just copying the practice of the iceweasel package
without giving it much thought.)
> This is flawed logic. Because there is no standard for this, and because
> this is a side issue from actual package work, every maintainer needs to
> work out this solution for themselves, and does things in a slightly
> different way.
I agree that the divergence and re-solving of the same problem is
unfortunate, but I don't think that's a very strong argument for inclusion
in common-licenses. It's a good argument for improving the documentation
and resources available to packagers, such as wider dissemination of the
DEP-5 copyright format.
> You missed my point. Verbatim text in copyright may be mechanically
> extractable, but not easily verifiable. It's hard in the general case to
> verify that a license block called "MPL" actually contains the full
> correct MPL text, both for machines and humans.
It's trivial to reverse the quoting for DEP-5 format. It's somewhat
harder if the license was reformatted in the process of quoting it. But,
regardless, writing code to verify that the maintainer did not err in
assembling the debian/copyright file is not something that I've heard
people previously want to do. Are you aware of some initiative here that
Policy work would make easier?
I want to be sure we're solving problems that we actually have, not
problems that we anticipate that we could have but that have not yet been
encountered.
The MPL 1.1, to be clear, does continue to have one of the better claims
of any license that's been put forward for inclusion in common-licenses
recently. But I'm still finding Ian's argument at:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=487201#64
fairly persuasive.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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