Bug#649530: [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: stanza specification
Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> This feels very much like delay tactics, and makes me feel very
> frustrated as someone who is trying to contribute to Debian.
You should consider the possibility that no one is trying to delay
anything, but rather that we simply aren't convinced by the changes that
you're proposing.
Having a formal grammar for license names that recognizes the version
component was something that was done in an earlier draft of this document
and then abandoned due to the complexity. Personally, having written
files to both the earlier and current grammar, I really don't miss it. It
makes the specification more formally robust, but at a cost to both
complexity and understanding when just casually applying the
specification.
I think most people are going to just look up their specific license in
the list of licenses that have pre-assigned keywords, use one if there is
one there, and make one up otherwise. I don't think having the grammar be
more formal about syntax and versioning is that helpful to that process.
> This is because people misunderstand what a License is; my changes will
> help communicate and correct this mistake.
> Different BSD-3-Clause licenses have the *same terms*; that is what
> makes them BSD-3-Clause. However, as commonly written, people add
> author- and software-specific information to their statement of the
> license. We cannot do this in debian/copyright because that would be
> logically inconsistent, since:
> If a package contains files under different BSD-3-Clause licenses, each
> with different owners, but the terms are the same, (according to my
> changes) the owners would be stripped out and put in the relevant Files:
> paragraphs, and the common terms would be put in *one* stand-alone
> License: paragraph. Currently, it is impossible to merge these; you
> would have to give the licenses each different names.
You've expressed this opinion before, and I understand what you're saying
and why you believe this. I just don't agree that this is a good change.
The serious problem with what you propose is that the exact text of the
upstream license is no longer reproduced in debian/copyright. I consider
that the baseline requirement for that file, and therefore consider that
to be a fatal problem.
Compared to losing the verbatim text, I think having multiple license
blocks for the variations of the license is a minor problem.
What I would find useful is some way to standardize the short names of the
variations of those licenses so that one can use distinguished short names
for the different variations within a file but still make it clear to
automated parsers that they're following the base license template. That
gains some of the benefit of your proposal in terms of making the file
clearer and allowing use of the standard license short names, without
losing the verbatim text of the license.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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