Am 30.11.2017 um 06:46 schrieb Steve Robbins: [...] > Has copyright summarizing outlived its usefulness for large sources? Why > shouldn't we have some way to say "Copyright by the Boost authors"? >
I completely agree with your rationale and there is even more room for improvement because I don't understand why we differentiate between common DFSG-free licenses and normal DFSG-free licenses (like MIT/Expat, CC-BY-SA, EPL, etc.) and require that the latter are added in verbatim to debian/copyright. Why don't we add all DFSG-free licenses to /usr/share/common-licenses or /usr/share/free-licenses instead? It would save a lot of developer and maintenance time if we could just reference those licenses on a standard Debian system instead of copying them over and over again. Other people came up with identical suggestions in the past and there are already bug reports against debian-policy. [1] [2] I find the concerns voiced in these bug reports unfounded and a reference/link to the MIT/Expat license is still shorter than the whole license. It shouldn't be any issue at all to provide all language specific variants of the Creative Commons licenses in some subdirectory under /usr/share/common-licenses and then we could simply refer to them from debian/copyright. To make it clear: This proposal does not reduce the quality of debian/copyright in any way. Having an accurate debian/copyright file is independent from quoting standard license texts. IMHO using links and references is just common sense and reduces unnecessary make work. Regards, Markus [1] https://bugs.debian.org/795402 [2] https://bugs.debian.org/833709
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