Re: DEP5 Files: paragraph with both abbreviated names and license paragraph
Klee Dienes <klee@MIT.EDU> writes:
> I’m helping a colleague with the packaging of the ‘hidapi’ package
> (http://mentors.debian.net/package/hidapi).
> In one of our Files: paragraphs, we have the following:
> License: GPL-3.0 or BSD-3-clause or HIDAPI
> At the discretion of the user of this library,
> this software may be licensed under the terms of the
> GNU General Public License v3, a BSD-Style license, or the
> original HIDAPI license as outlined in the LICENSE.txt,
> LICENSE-gpl3.txt, LICENSE-bsd.txt, and LICENSE-orig.txt
> files located at the root of the source distribution.
> These files may also be found in the public source
> code repository located at:
> http://github.com/signal11/hidapi .
> (where each of the abbreviated names is specified in a separate
> stand-alone license paragraph).
You have hit a corner case that wasn't considered in the current
copyright-format 1.0 language. The current document assumes that any
given license paragraph will be in one of two forms: a single-line field
that specifies a combination of licenses defined elsewhere, or a multiline
field that fully explains the entire license that applies to those files.
What you want to do is a hybrid: a License field that specifies a
combination of licenses defined elsewhere in the file *and* adds some
additional discussion of what that combination of licenses means and how
upstream specifies them.
Whether this is valid is really not addressed in copyright-format 1.0 by
my reading. It's not clear that it's valid, and it's not clear that it's
invalid. Lintian took a conservative interpretation.
My recommendation would be, for the time being, to write this as:
License: GPL-3.0 or BSD-3-clause or HIDAPI
Comment: At the discretion of the user of this library,
this software may be licensed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License v3, a BSD-Style license, or the
original HIDAPI license as outlined in the LICENSE.txt,
LICENSE-gpl3.txt, LICENSE-bsd.txt, and LICENSE-orig.txt
files located at the root of the source distribution.
These files may also be found in the public source
code repository located at:
http://github.com/signal11/hidapi .
and then retain all of the separate License blocks. This is clearly
allowed by copyright-format 1.0 and should be properly parsed by Lintian
as well.
In the long run, I would be in favor of making your approach unambiguously
valid in a subsequent copyright-format 1.1 revision.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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