The usual term of art for the D-Bus interface descriptions you're talking about here is "introspection XML".
On Mon, 19 Mar 2018 at 16:09:02 +0800, Boyuan Yang wrote: > * Vala source code files are generated from D-Bus interface spec files > (XML format) using "vala-dbus-binding-tool" (exist in Debian Archive) > * Some of XML spec files are generated using "dbus-send" tool (exist > in Debian Archive) dbus-send doesn't "generate" anything. It sends a message and prints the reponse. Saying that dbus-send generates introspection XML is like saying that wget generates the content of a web page. Depending on the service you're using as the destination in your dbus-send request, the introspection XML might either have been copied from the source code into the service binary as a large string literal, or constructed on-demand from data structures like GLib's GDBusInterfaceInfo. I've seen both approaches used. > * Other XML files are copied from Freedesktop.org website [4] and gnome-shell > source code > Now, here is the problem: contents in fd.o website has no licensing > information. I asked (daniels) at irc #freedesktop and the person said > that the status quo is "undefined" and it is not likely to change in > near future. If a particular freedesktop.org specification (in your case the File Manager interface) doesn't have copyright/licensing information at its upstream source, the only people who can give you that information are the authors of that specification. The fact that a specification is hosted on freedesktop.org isn't really any more significant here than the fact that something else is hosted on Github. > However, I'm not sure about the license of D-Bus interface itself as > well as the XML file that describes such interface. There is no single required license for D-Bus introspection XML, in the same way that there is no single required license for C source code. The org.freedesktop.DBus interface is defined by the D-Bus Specification and its reference implementation "dbus", which are both available under a dual-license: GPL-2.0 or any later version, or AFL-2.1 (see /usr/share/doc/dbus/copyright); so the most restrictive terms that could possibly be applied are that dual license. The freedesktop.org File Manager interface is presumably defined by some freedesktop.org specification: you know as much about this one as I do. The org.gnome.Shell Screencast interface is presumably defined by GNOME Shell and released under the same licensing terms as the rest of Shell. > Anyway, it is an interface, not any concrete implementation. I am not a lawyer, but I suspect that a bare interface description without documentation, like <https://github.com/phw/peek/blob/master/src/dbus/org.freedesktop.DBus.xml> and <https://github.com/phw/peek/blob/master/src/dbus/org.freedesktop.FileManager1.xml>, might be considered to be sufficiently un-creative that it is not protected by copyright: it's a purely functional description of what is necessary to interoperate with a fd.o file manager. An interface description that contains comments/documentation should probably be treated like source code, though. Ideally the upstream developers of GNOME Shell would put copyright/licensing information in their introspection XML just like they should for any other source code. > P.S. I'm asking this question looking for an answer to make sure that > this package won't get rejected during the NEW process by ftp-masters > due to licensing problems. Only the ftp team can tell you whether they would accept or reject a package and why. The debian-legal mailing list has no authority over the ftp team. smcv
