Santiago Vila <sanv...@unex.es> writes: > On Sun, 5 Aug 2007, Sam Hocevar wrote:
>> There are still many packages that mention the GPL version 1 in >> their copyright file (around 350). Many Perl packages, but also Perl >> itself and widespread things like sed, joe, cvs, dict... >> There are also countless packages that are under the GPL without >> mentioning the version at all (more than 2,000 but I was unable to get >> a precise number), they should therefore be considered "version 1 or >> above". >> This is why I believe it wouldn't hurt to ship the GPL-1 with >> base-files, even if most people are going to use "any later >> version". It can be found here: >> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.txt > I delegate this decision to the policy group, as explained in base-files > FAQ. > As your proposal does not require a change in debian-policy, you would > only need two seconds and no objections. > However, my personal opinion is that the GPL v1 should be considered > obsolete and we should deprecate it. The FSF would probably tell you > that the GPLv1 has bugs which have been fixed in GPLv2 and GPLv3. > We would be happier if we had less licenses to consider, not more. This has come up several times since the last activity on this bug, and now that I have a tool to check the licenses across all packages in Debian, I went and took a look at the usage. The result is that there is a minimum of 1,540 packages in Debian licensed under the GPL version 1 (possibly with the or-later clause). This is an undercount, since this is only picking up those packages that use a DEP-5 copyright file. There are also 10,116 packages that refer to the unversioned GPL symlink, and I know from personal experience at least some of those are also licensed under the GPL version 1 or later. Given that, while I'm very sympathetic to Santiago's argument, I also think that we should be able to represent in packages their upstream licensing statement and not be implicitly relicensing them under later versions of the GPL, and without including a bunch of copies of the GPL version 1. The usage of the license is high enough to qualify for common-licenses under our normal criteria: long license, used by over 5% of the binary packages in the archive, and used in packages that are installed on every system (perl-base). I therefore propose adding GPL version 1 to the list of licenses said by Policy to be in common-licenses and asking Santiago to include a copy in base-files. I'm not including a diff since it would just create merge conflicts with the BSD diff proposed earlier today and because it's fairly obvious, although I can if people would prefer. Objections or seconds? Copying debian-perl on this message since that's the set of developers who are most affected by this. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
