Bug#883950: Next steps on "[GPL-3+]" proposal

[Paul Hardy <unifoundry@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 10:26 AM, Ian Jackson
<ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Paul Hardy writes ("Bug#883950: Next steps on "[GPL-3+]" proposal"):
>>      License: GPL-2
>>       file:///usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2
>
> I'm late to this party, but one of the things that is wrong[1] with
> SPDX is that it implicitly encourages what I would call GPL-v2-only or
> whatever, rather than (say) GPLv2+.
>
> IMO in Debian we should not perpetuate this.
>
> Ian.
>
> [1] politically opposed to my own goals, probably deliberately so on
> the part of the SPDX authors

My intention was not to encourage licensing packages as GPL version
"n" only, but to provide a working example of how to handle that
situation.  I suppose you could think of it as the Linux kernel corner
case.

The main suggestion I wanted to make was to use a URI to point to an
uncompressed README file that explains what the "+" implies in GPL-2+,
etc.  Some earlier discussion in this bug report concerned how to
inform the reader what the "+" meant.  If we provide URIs in
debian/copyright, and those URIs actually exist on the system, I think
it can be said that the package has made a good faith effort to
provide the reader with the full licensing information without full
"License" stanzas.  That form would even pass current Lintian checks,
and possibly other checks as well, which was another concern raised in
this bug report.

My post was only a suggestion as a way to handle those issues though,
not a request.

Thanks,


Paul Hardy