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

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

On Wed, 01 Aug 2018 at 19:23:09 -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
> 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.

In the past, it has been asserted that maintainers are required to
paste the text written by upstream that tells the consumer that they
may redistribute the package under a specified license, verbatim,
into the copyright file. That's what I meant whenever I said "license
grant" on this bug. (Not to be confused with the text you can find in
/usr/share/common-licenses, which tells you what the terms of the GPL
are, but does not tell you that you can distribute any particular piece
of software under those terms.)

This might be in the form

    """
    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.
    """

or

    """
    This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
    Alike 3.0 Unported license.
    """

but equally it might be

    """
    SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2+
    """

or even

    """
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001979.html>:
      http://f0rqu3.deviantart.com/art/quake3-icon-64264660
      this is the one I made from the original logo
      and there is another in ioquake3 svn
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001980.html>:
      This is awesome, can I use it?
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001981.html>:
      I think he ment to use it under the GPL in ioq3 :)
      For normal use there is no need to ask...
      http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001984.html>:
      yes. I cant choose GPL as license in DA so I use CC :/
    """

> | 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.

The reason I am being so pedantic about this is that previous statements
from the ftp team have implied that paraphrasing the license grant text
provided by upstream (for example simplifying "This program is free
software; etc." into "License: GPL-2+") is not acceptable, and I want
to be sure that this rule has intentionally been changed.

(For clarity, I think what you said is a very valuable simplification,
and I would love to be able to stop copying and pasting upstreams'
license grant text.)

    smcv