Bug#649530: [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: stanza specification
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
> Charles Plessy wrote:
>> Sorry for the confusion between new field and new paragraph. Still, I
>> think that we are spending a lot of time discussing refinements that
>> need to demonstrate their usefulness by being adopted independantly by
>> a broad number of package maintainers.
> Stepping back a little, do I understand correctly that you mean "No, I
> do not think License-Exception paragraphs would be useful"?
> That's useful feedback and surprising to me. More details would be
> welcome.
I don't think they're particularly useful, mostly because I don't see a
serious problem with the current syntax and therefore don't see a good
reason to make it more complicated.
There is an annoying corner case (multiple licenses that use the same
exception but which aren't in common-licenses and therefore have to be
quoted in their entirety) where not having this feature could result in
serious copyright file bloat. However, I think this is rare. Most
license exceptions are used with the GPL, which is in common-licenses, so
the License blocks are short and duplicating them is not much wasted
space.
The argument against them is that a license with a license exception is
only two separable components if the license says that it is. In most
cases (such as GPL v2 with an exception), it's really a brand new license
that happens to share a lot of characteristics with the base license.
Separating out the language so that it's presented in separate paragraphs,
which I think is the key point of having this feature, runs the risk of
not correctly reproducing the *actual* license text in the copyright file.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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