Bug#883950: Next steps on "[GPL-3+]" proposal
Stuart Prescott <stuart@debian.org> writes:
> TL;DR: I'd prefer we didn't use the brackets or bump version numbers,
> hence challenging this now before it becomes too entrenched.
> * In copyright-format/1.0, the tokens specifying the licences are
> entirely opaque with the exception of the + at the end (and then these
> tokens are concatenated with and/or/,/with(.*)exception etc). Opaqueness
> is a handy property to maintain but is violated by the use of the
> brackets as [GPL-3+].
> * A file with "License: [GPL-3+]" and a file with "License: GPL-3+" are
> under the same licence and making it look different is no benefit. For
> the common licences we are discussing, the important information is
> 'which licence', most readers will already know what the tokens mean and
> there is no need to do more; this seem pretty uncontroversial as it is,
> after all, pretty foundational to the proposal to remove the "On Debian
> systems, …" text.
Thank you. I was struggling with this but couldn't put my finger on what
was bothering me. Why not just say that we can omit the "can be found in
/usr/share/common-licenses" text completely and otherwise leave the format
unmodified?
I agree that we should probably add /usr/share/common-licenses to the
default motd. Currently, we say:
The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free
software; the exact distribution terms for each program are described
in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
and could just add something like:
The full texts of common licenses used by multiple packages can be
found in /usr/share/common-licenses.
Then, in a README in /usr/share/common-licenses, we could say something
very short like:
References to one of these licenses with a + appended, such as
"GPL-2+", indicate the choice of the named license file or any later
version of the same license.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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