Hi,
Am 18.12.2017 um 23:37 schrieb Jonathan Nieder:
> 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.
I don't think there is a reason to be worried. But I do have an opinion
and I am expressing it. I believe I am not the only one who feels that
we need to rethink debian/copyright.
> 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.
This is the argument that comes up whenever someone tries to change
something in regard to d/copyright. We have always done it this way and
we do more than legally required because we are Debian. I believe that
most free software authors are also happy with the way Fedora or FreeBSD
are respecting their works and if you say that some in the project
consider the Debian way the right thing to do, then let me say that
there are also other people who think we can improve d/copyright without
sacrificing accuracy and still meet all legal requirements.
> 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.
Well, that was exactly my point. Our debian/copyright file which uses
copyright format 1.0 contains this line
https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
a link to the specification. There can be a short license name like
License: GPL-2 or License: GPL-2+.
I was pointing out that it is already common practice to write those
license short names and point to /usr/share/common/licenses/GPL-2 with
another sentence. I don't share Sean's concerns but they can be remedied
by clarifying our copyright format document. In addition we could reduce
boilerplate by allowing an even shorter version than
License: GPL-2+
On Debian system the full license text of the GNU General Public
License 2 can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2
namely
License: [GPL-2+]
If we document that brackets around the short license name have the same
meaning than our common paragraph from above, we have gained a new
concise way of documenting a license without sacrificing accuracy. I'm
not sure why you think this is not obvious.
> 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.
In my opinion the creation of automated tools like cme is evidence that
our current approach of writing debian/copyright is in parts wrong.
Instead of doing the obvious and referencing existing license texts we
duplicate them. We should not need an automated tool to write
debian/copyright. I believe the proposal in this bug report can be
implemented quite easily without conflating the automated tools idea.
Regards,
Markus
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