Bug#487201: MPL in common-licenses and convenience of packaging mozilla extensions
Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> On 29/08/11 17:48, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The project decided to say that our packages are intended for use on a
>> Debian system with the essential Debian packages installed and hence
>> not duplicate licenses that are in base-files, which I think is a bit
>> of a hand-wave, but which lets us avoid shipping 20,000 copies of the
>> GPL. The legal requirements are generally quite clear, and the ideal
>> legal position to be in is inclusion of relevant license texts in every
>> package so that the individual object that we distribute is legally
>> complete.
> OK, this is understandable. I suppose we can't get around the fact that
> each source package should have the full text of a license.
And every binary package. They're usually the same case as far as legal
requirements go, and it's definitely possible to download the binary
packages as independent distributions from the source packages.
> However, this doesn't mean that we must include them in debian/copyright
> specifically - is this restriction really necessary for policy? (I know
> this is off-topic for the bug but it's a continuation of the
> discussion.)
You don't need to include them in debian/copyright in the source package,
but you normally need to arrange for them to end up in the copyright file
in the binary package, and that's probably the easiest way.
Now, this is not true of all licenses. Some licenses don't require
inclusion of the licensing terms in the binary package; the MPL is one of
them, in fact. But nearly all of them do, so it's a good default to stick
with. I suppose we could have a separate discussion about whether to make
special rules for the licenses like the MPL that don't require this.
> It would be less trouble if you could point to license files.
See, for example, the GPL v3:
4. Conveying Verbatim Copies.
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you
receive it, in any medium, provided that you [...] give all
recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.
and:
6. Conveying Non-Source Forms.
You may convey a covered work in object code form under the terms of
sections 4 and 5, provided that [...]
So it's up to a legal interpretation of the term "give all recipients a
copy of this License along with the Program." Obviously, including the
license in the package satisfies this trivially without requiring anyone
to think about it or get a legal opinion. Debian has concluded that
shipping a copy of the license in common-licenses and including a pointer
to it in each package is sufficient in this case (although I'm a little
leery of whether Debian really sought legal advice on this point before
including additional licenses in common-licenses).
> It would also support more powerful automation tools. For example, we
> can have a dh script dereference these pointers and install all the
> license texts into the package's /doc/. And maybe have a licenses-helper
> program which could detect dangling pointers, and fill the common ones
> in automatically, to save the maintainer having to find them if they
> weren't included with upstream.
Note that there are some substantial advantages to having all legal
information in a single file, not just in terms of complexity and possible
bugs in not including the right files, but also for ease of extracting
that file and displaying it alongside the package or making it available
independently from the package, which we already do in some cases (for QA
purposes, for instance).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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