On 22/09/14 17:15, Markus Koschany wrote:
> A while ago I have started to use this
> format [1] for common licenses when I saw that fellow maintainers did
> the same.
>
> [1] Examples:
>
> License: GPL-2+
> On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public
> License version 2 can be found in "/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2".
You are right that it is not required to quote the text of the GNU GPL.
To be clear that we're talking about the same thing, the text of the GNU
GPL is a lengthy document with (as of version 3) a "Preamble", 17
numbered sections of "Terms and Conditions", and an appendix "How to
Apply These Terms to Your New Programs".
However, these couple of paragraphs:
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
(or similar for v2) are not the GPL. That's just the (conventional form
of the) license grant: the thing that gives you permission to distribute
this work under the GPL.
The point headed "Its not enough to have the following two-liner" in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html
appears to be intended to be a requirement to reproduce the license
grant in the copyright file, even if the work is under the GPL or
another license in common-licenses.
I'm not sure why the ftp-masters require the license grant to be copied
into the copyright file, and it would be nice if there was wording in
(capital P) Policy backing this up, or a definitive statement from the
ftp-masters saying that, yes, they require license grants to be quoted
even if the license text does not need to be copied (and preferably
why); but at the moment the email to which you referred is as canonical
a statement of (small p) policy as we have.
For BSD and other highly permissive licenses, the license grant and the
full license text are typically the same thing; for longer licenses like
(L)GPL, GFDL, Creative Commons, Apache, MPL, etc., the license grant is
somewhere between a couple of lines and a couple of paragraphs, the full
license text is a multi-page thing, and it's a significant space-saving
to be able to point into common-licenses (if allowed) even if you have
to quote the license grant.
Also note that (at least as far as I've gathered from Debian project
folklore, and I'd appreciate a ftp-master ruling on this one way or the
other) the license grant you're meant to reproduce is the one that the
copyright holder actually wrote, not the one that is
standard/recommended/conventional for the license. openarena-data
contains a couple of files with very truncated GPL license grants:
License: short-GPL-2
"released under the gpl v2 license (read COPYING)"
.
You can find the GPL license text on a Debian system under
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.
License: even-shorter-GPL-2
"License: GPLv2"
.
You can find the GPL license text on a Debian system under
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.
I'm not sure how that interacts with license grants that are more vague
than we'd really like (e.g. a top-level COPYING file, no per-file
notices, and a statement somewhere that the work is under the license in
COPYING), which are particularly common in games and other
non-commercial projects maintained by people who don't necessarily
understand the finer points of licensing.
It would be great if the ftp-masters could confirm whether what I've
said in this mail is true, and the reasoning behind it.
Regards,
S
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