Bug#883950: debian-policy: allow specifying common licenses with only the identifier

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi Markus,

Markus Koschany wrote:
> Am 16.12.2017 um 15:55 schrieb Sean Whitton:
>> On Wed, Dec 13 2017, Markus Koschany wrote:

>>> If the Policy editors cannot make a decision with regards to
>>> debian/copyright then we should ask the DPL to seek legal advice and
>>> when necessary start a GR for reasons of legitimacy.
>>
>> If we think this issue is important enough to spend money on that.  I am
>> not convinced it is.
>
> Then we need a GR. Simply claiming that something violates the law
> without proof cannot be the right way for a large project like Debian.
> This is a very important topic because writing debian/copyright is not
> optional in Debian. I simply believe that most people appreciate doing
> something meaningful in their free time.

You are of course free to initiate a GR at any time.

I have no opinion about this particular proposal (allowing specifying
common licenses with only the identifier).  But I am worried at how
black and white you are describing the world to be.

Debian has long had a practice of being extra careful to respect the
wishes of free software authors as expressed in the licenses they
choose.  This goes beyond the minimum legal requirements of license
compliance.  It is not because the project is afraid of being sued but
because at least some in the project consider it to be the right thing
to do.

Here Sean pointed out that just a license name with too little
accompanying text does not appear to be particularly clear to end
users.  That means end users may not know what their rights are, so it
seems worth thinking about.  Fortunately DEP-5 copyright files contain

 Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/

so perhaps some information in the copyright-format would be good
enough to help those end users.  Perhaps not.  But I am puzzled that
you seem to think there is only one possible right answer and that it
should be obvious to everybody.

The way you describe the experience of writing a debian/copyright file
is foreign to my own experience.  It sounds like making the process of
generating /usr/share/doc/{package}/copyright using *automated tools*
in a smoother way will be a good avenue for addressing the developer
experience issues you are mentioning.  Then you'd be in a better
position to come up with what the appropriate content of that file
should be to serve end users.

Thanks and hope that helps,
Jonathan