Bug#884228: debian-policy: please add OFL-1.1 to common licenses

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Markus Koschany wrote:

>              I still have to quote license texts verbatim. The only
> "advantage" of the old format is that I can format d/copyright more
> freely but the same information must be present anyway. It is simply not
> feasible to educate all upstreams in existence to write a Debian-like
> copyright file. They rightly say that it is not their problem how
> downstreams process and treat their copyright information.

This may be the source of my confusion.  I am used to upstreams being
cooperative when I ask them for a clear LICENSE file, especially when I
provide them with a patch to do so.

Some licenses even require that.  Upstream has to follow the license,
too, when they incorporate code from third parties.  Even in a
situation where they wrote all the code themselves, making license
compliance easy for downstream users helps adoption of their code.

In other words, I have almost never experienced the kind of resistance
you are talking about.

Even a package that adopts copyright-format 1.0 does not need to put
per-file license information in debian/copyright.  It is perfectly
okay to have a single 'Files: *' paragraph with the project's license.
Some maintainers prefer to maintain per-file license information since
they think it makes their lives easier.

Thanks,
Jonathan