Package: debian-policy Version: 4.1.5.0 Control: block 883950 by -1 X-debbugs-cc: ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org, 883950@bugs.debian.org Hello, Must debian/copyright include the license grant? Section 12.5 of the Policy Manual does not make it clear whether the license grant must be included. If we want to implement anything like what's being discussed in #883950, we need section 12.5 to state explicitly that the license grant need not be included. More generally, there is disagreement and confusion within the project and in the archive about whether it must be included. It would likely make contributors' lives easier if section 12.5 were explicit about it. What is the license grant? Here is a DEP-5 stanza *with* the grant: > License: GPL-2+ > This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify > it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by > the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or > (at your option) any later version. > . > This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, > but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of > MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the > GNU General Public License for more details. > . > You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along > with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., > 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA. > . > On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public > License version 2 can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'. Here is a DEP-5 stanza *without* the license grant: > License: GPL-2+ > On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in > /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2 i.e. the license grant is the statement from upstream that the software is licensed under a given license. It does not form part of the license itself. Please note that this discussion does *not* block the merged bugs #645696, #649530, #737796 and #786470. The proposal there is simply to document the License-Grant: field in the DEP-5 copyright format, a field which is already in use in the archive. That proposal does not settle the question of the present bug. Indeed, that proposal is just waiting on refining the patch (Jonas Smedegaard is working on that here at DebCamp) and there is no remaining controversy. In this bug, by contrast, nothing is yet clear. Thank you to David Bremner and Stuart Prescott for noting that #883950 conflates the question of whether the license grant must be included with questions about how best to extend the copyright format. In fact, we have to resolve the question of the present bug first. Please try to restrict discussion in this bug to the abstract question of whether or not the license grant should be included in debian/copyright. Please leave aside questions about the formatting of debian/copyright. We simply have to resolve the former question first. -- Sean Whitton
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