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Bug#833709: Please add the MIT/Expat license to common-licenses



On Sun, 07 Aug 2016 at 21:00:12 -1000, Josh Triplett wrote:
> Numerous packages use the MIT/Expat license, and currently all of those
> packages need to include it in their copyright files.

Although Policy does not say so, the ftp-masters require the license
grant to be quoted in the copyright file, even for common-licenses. [1][2]

For the Expat license and other simple licenses, the license grant *is*
the license, so putting it in common-licenses would make no difference
to the length or complexity of copyright files unless the ftp-masters
were willing to change their policy to accept something like

    Files: foo
    Copyright: © 2000 Mickey Mouse
    License: Expat

(or its non-machine-readable equivalent) without any further text.

It is not clear to me why quoting the license grant is required, if the
license in question doesn't require it (the GPL doesn't seem to require
it for binaries). I asked for clarification in [3] but didn't see a reply.
However, for the specific case of the Expat license, if I'm reading the
license correctly you are required to include the license grant with the
(binary form of the) software. For compiled code, the copyright file is
likely the most convenient way to achieve that.

In practice, in packages like openjk with many superficially different
versions of the GPL boilerplate, I've had uploads accepted through NEW
quoting only one of them, and noting "and other superficially different
versions" alongside that... so it seems the ftp-masters aren't actually
quite as pedantic about verbatim license grants as [1], [2] might imply
(which is good, because if they were, copyright files would be even more
unwieldy than they are now).

It would be great if Policy described what the ftp-masters actually
require and why, so that maintainers could provide everything that Debian
needs to avoid legal trouble but no more. At the moment, Policy is rather
more vague than the actual requirements to get software into Debian; there
seems to be some (unwritten?) policy based on ftp-master consensus.

    S

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/12/msg00007.html
[3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/09/msg00708.html


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