Bug#649530: [copyright-format] clearer definitions and more consistent License: stanza specification
Package: debian-policy
Followup-For: Bug #649530
Hi all, I just noticed that SPDX have released a new version of their spec
that agrees with what I was trying to propose originally here:
See [1] "Deprecated License" and [2] Appendix IV: SPDX License Expressions:
| Simple License Expressions
|
| An SPDX License List Short Form Identifier with a unary"+" operator suffix to represent the current
| version of the license or any later version. For example: GPL-2.0+
May we restart discussing updating debian's copyright-format to be consistent
with this?
To recap, in case people have forgotten:
Currently the format 1.0 specifies (and lintian warns) if I have GPL-3 and
GPL-3+ licensed files in my package, but I only have a GPL-3 License stanza
(and not another "GPL-3+" stanza). My argument was that this is pointless
redundancy, counterarguments complained that "+" was not well-defined, but
then one could re-counter that "and" and "or" was also not well-defined.
Anyway it looks like SPDX now agrees with me, and probably got fed up of this
redundancy themselves.
Concretely, what would need to be changed in copyright-format 1.1 would be
similar to what SPDX have done, i.e.:
a) define + an operator, similar to "or" and "and" that already exist
b) drop the GPL-2+ et al "short names"
c) define a "with <LicenseException" operator
d) add a License-Exception paragraph
Luckily SPDX have already done all the hard work of defining this stuff
precisely, and you can read about it yourself in Appendix IV.
A technical note is that our "short names" correspond to their "SPDX License
List Short Form Identifier". Additionally, they distinguish between a "Simple"
vs "Composite" license expression but I don't think we need to do that. We
*could*, but it just adds complexity and I don't see the point here.
X
[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/
[2] https://spdx.org/sites/spdx/files/SPDX-2.0.pdf
-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
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