Bug#904729: Policy 12.5: Must the license grant be included in debian/copyright?

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Markus Koschany wrote:

> FYI: Here is what one of the ftp-masters, Jörg Jaspert, wrote in
> response to my proposal to reduce boilerplate in debian/copyright.
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883950#80
>
> I believe it shows the generally tendency that they are in favor of the
> proposal.

Agreed: my understanding is that ftp-masters are fine with the
reference to common-licenses being implicit.

Simon McVittie wrote:

>   ( ) the full text of the license, *and* the license grant
>       (unless the license *is* the license grant, like BSD-style licenses)

This wording confuses me.  All licenses are license grants.  The issue
with having a (non-copyright-format) copyright file that simply states

|  On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in
|  /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2

is that that is just an irrelevant statement of fact; it doesn't tell
the reader what the license of the package is!  On the other hand,

| Files: *
| License: GPL-2+
|  On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in
|  /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2

in combination with

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

makes the intention very clear; the only potential icing on the top
would be if there were some file for users explaining how to interpret
this file.

Thanks,
Jonathan