Bug#904729: Policy 12.5: Must the license grant be included in debian/copyright?
On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 06:15:54PM +0800, Sean Whitton wrote:
> Hello,
>
> On Thu 02 Aug 2018 at 10:14AM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote:
>
> > 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.)
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > 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.
>
> Right.
>
> In my role as one of the maintainers of Policy, I do not consider the
> single e-mail we have from Joerg in the other bug sufficient to confirm
> that we can write in Policy "The license grant need not be included."
>
> Given that the ftp-team have previously explicitly said that the
> paraphrasing is not acceptable, we need an explicit statement that their
> view has changed.
>
> I hope that those driving this proposal do not find this too
> frustrating, but we would really not be improving things if we added
> that statement, only to find packages being rejected from NEW because
> their copyright files did not include license grants. We need to be
> sure.
I completely agree with Sean. This is a matter where policy must defer
to the ftp-master team.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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