Re: [DEP5] License field in the first paragraph ?
Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> writes:
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 12:23:44AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> But there are two other main reasons why I want an overall package
>> license:
>> * It's common to release GPL'd software that includes some
>> 2-clause-BSD-licensed files, taking advantage of the ability to
>> relicense under the BSD licensing terms. In this case, the
>> distribution as a whole is released under the GPL, but those files are
>> still under the BSD. Without a global License statement, there isn't a
>> good way to represent this without requiring someone draw that
>> inference from the licenses of the individual files.
>> * I suspect that a lot of people won't be interested in documenting the
>> license and copyright terms of every individual file, and ftpmaster has
>> in the past allowed this in many cases when the package is huge and all
>> the files are licensed under compatible terms. In that case, it's nice
>> to be able to just specify a general package license and make it
>> explicit that one is not claiming to have a comprehensive listing of
>> all files with their copyright and license statements.
> I believe that both of above essentially is about _our_ relicensing,
> rather than just documenting _upstream_ licensing.
Hm, well, given that I've been asking for this specifically so that I can
use DEP-5 as upstream for my upstream LICENSE file, I obviously don't
agree. And the first point above is, to me, all about upstream's
licensing, not about ours.
> I.e. regarding my example, even if DEP5 should be corrected to also
> mention License: in header paragraph, I should _still_ below that
> include a "Files: *" paragraph with identical Copyright and License,
> because the header covers our relicensing and the Files paragraphs cover
> upstream licensing.
You should only do that if you're claiming that you've checked all the
files in the package and they're released under that explicit license and
not some other, compatible license, IMO.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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