Bug#910548: base-files - please consider adding /usr/share/common-licenses/Unicode-Data

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Paul Hardy <unifoundry@gmail.com> writes:

> I recently formatted the Unicode Data license for the d/copyright file
> of a Debian package that I created.  I thought I would offer it to
> Debian if you are interested.  You probably do not want the Copyright
> stanza, and you might not want the Comment stanza, but I erred on the
> side of too much rather than too little.

> Unicode data files are used in a number of free software packages, such
> as linux-libc-dev and the Linux kernel itself.  Use of Unicode data in
> software is likely to continue growing over time.  Thus you might find
> this useful.

Hi Paul,

It looks like you included the entire statement from the web site, which I
think is intended to cover the whole web site.  As near as I can tell, the
files that Debian is packaging are the ones referenced by this stanza:

    4. Further specifications of rights and restrictions pertaining to the
       use of the particular set of data files known as the "Unicode
       Character Database" can be found in the License.

and therefore appear to only be covered by this license instead:

    https://www.unicode.org/license.html

The full license that you formatted includes a bunch of other clauses like
choice of venue and unilateral license changes that I don't think are
intended to cover the things that we're packaging.  I think we should
therefore consider incorporating only the above text instead?

Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> writes:

> According to my wrangling of codesearch.debian.net, unicode.org gets
> mentioned in over 1,000 packages and it's mostly about this data.  I
> think that's enough to merit inclusion in common-licenses.

Could you provide more detail on your search?  I searched for:

    path:debian/copyright DOWNLOADING, INSTALLING, COPYING OR OTHERWISE
    USING UNICODE INC

and only found 26 packages.  I'm not sure that's enough to warrant
inclusion in common-licenses.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>