Bug#649530: [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: stanza specification
Ximin Luo <infinity0@gmx.com> writes:
> On 25/12/12 18:28, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> 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.
> Well, more criticism would be appreciated rather than silence. The
> counter-arguments made so far haven't been very strong; I can't read
> people's minds see criticism beyond this. There is no "motivation"
> document for this spec either so it's not like I can infer this too.
I'm fairly sure that either I or someone else made these points in the
original 2011 thread that preceded the Debian Policy bug, and Charles
makes the same point about the BSD license text in:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=649530#35
Anyway, it doesn't really matter. Debian is good at discussing things
repeatedly. :) And it's been a long thread split across two (well, now
three) years, so I don't expect anyone to remember all of it.
> My proposal does not make anything "more formal". The two main changes
> are {moving one concept into another section} and {restricting the
> definition for a section}.
Yes, I said that very poorly. I apologize.
I agree that you're not going all the way back to having a formal
specification for the version number, like we had in the past, but making
the license exception a separate entity still feels like movement towards
making the format more structured and somewhat more complicated. Anyway,
this is a minor point; I wouldn't reject the proposal for this reason, so
it's probably not worth discussing in any great depth. It's more of a gut
reaction than a considered opinion.
The main point that I'm getting at here is that I'd like to see a specific
case where splitting the license exceptions out into separate paragraphs
makes the debian/copyright file either substantially shorter or
substantially easier to read. I'm not seeing it right now.
I re-read the discussion of the difference between the license notice and
the license, specifically for the GPL cases, and I do see your point
there. However, I'm also nervous about dropping the upstream license
notice entirely. We could add a new field to hold the license notice, but
now again we're getting into places where I'm not sure the additional
complexity really saves anyone much time or effort compared to just having
multiple License sections, one for each substantial variation of the
licensing terms. The GPL notice and pointer to common-licenses is pretty
short. Basically, I agree with Steve at:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=649530#65
although I don't feel as strongly about it as he did at the time.
> Why is it essential for the verbatim text to be in debian/copyright,
> when the source package should already contain this? We could
> alternatively add a Location: field to point to the verbatim license in
> /usr/share/doc or the base directory of the source package, rather than
> duplicating information?
Why do we have debian/copyright at all when the source package already
contains the licensing information? There are a bunch of reasons, one of
which being that it's common for licensing text to require that the
license accompany any derivative work, such as a binary package.
>> 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.
> I'm not sure I understand this. How is this different from the current
> case where you can specify multiple License fields (in different Files
> paragraphs) with the same short name (e.g. BSD-3-Clause) but different
> full text (e.g. containing copyright year, authors)?
The current specification requires that short names be unique within a
given copyright file:
First line: an abbreviated name for the license, or expression giving
alternatives (see the Short name section for a list of standard
abbreviations). If there are licenses present in the package without
a standard short name, an arbitrary short name may be assigned for
these licenses. These arbitrary names are only guaranteed to be
unique within a single copyright file.
That's not exactly unambiguous, but I always assumed that meant that you
shouldn't reuse the same short name for different license texts.
If we intend to permit using BSD-3-Clause for any license of that form
regardless of the proper names embedded in it, we should really say that
explicitly. However, the other problem with doing that is that if there
are several different files covered by the same variant of that BSD
license, but other files in the package covered by a different variant,
it's not possible to separate the variants out into standalone license
paragraphs. They all use the same short name, so you end up with multiple
license paragraphs with the same short name and different text and no way
of correlating them with the Files sections.
It might be worthwhile to recognize some sort of syntax similar to license
exceptions so that one can tag the license as "BSD-3-Clause by <copyright
holder>" or the like. That would let one use standalone license
paragraphs for those licenses without the ambiguity problem, while still
making it clear for automated license analysis that the license in
question is the BSD-3-Clause license (which using something like
BSD-3-Clause-<holder> doesn't do).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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