package debian-policy user [EMAIL PROTECTED] retitle 284340 Remove reference to UC in BSD license or remove license usertag 284340 = normative discussion tags 284340 -wontfix thanks
This bug proposed two changes: first, remove the specific reference to the University of California from the BSD license in common-licenses, and second, add several other similar licenses (two-clause BSD, Expat, and X11). I'm rejecting the second change on the grounds recently discussed on the debian-policy list in several other bugs about license files, namely that the purpose of the common-licenses directory is to save archive space for long and complex licenses and these licenses are all short and simple to include in debian/copyright. Furthermore, these licenses frequently have slightly different wording or embed different copyright holder names in the license text, meaning that correctly referring to a shared central copy is tricky and won't be possible for as many packages as it might first appear. However, the first change in this bug is still relevant, and there doesn't appear to be another open bug on this issue. The current BSD license in common-licenses is not particularly useful since it specifically lists the University of California as the copyright holder and therefore can only be used to refer to UC-licensed code, not anything else under the same license. That specific copyright holder should probably either be removed or the whole license should be removed from common-licenses. My preference would be the latter, but we'd first need to find any packages that refer to the file and add the license text to the packages in question. If someone would tackle that research, that would be very helpful. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
