Klee Dienes <k...@mit.edu> writes: > I’m helping a colleague with the packaging of the ‘hidapi’ package > (http://mentors.debian.net/package/hidapi).
> In one of our Files: paragraphs, we have the following: > License: GPL-3.0 or BSD-3-clause or HIDAPI > At the discretion of the user of this library, > this software may be licensed under the terms of the > GNU General Public License v3, a BSD-Style license, or the > original HIDAPI license as outlined in the LICENSE.txt, > LICENSE-gpl3.txt, LICENSE-bsd.txt, and LICENSE-orig.txt > files located at the root of the source distribution. > These files may also be found in the public source > code repository located at: > http://github.com/signal11/hidapi . > (where each of the abbreviated names is specified in a separate > stand-alone license paragraph). You have hit a corner case that wasn't considered in the current copyright-format 1.0 language. The current document assumes that any given license paragraph will be in one of two forms: a single-line field that specifies a combination of licenses defined elsewhere, or a multiline field that fully explains the entire license that applies to those files. What you want to do is a hybrid: a License field that specifies a combination of licenses defined elsewhere in the file *and* adds some additional discussion of what that combination of licenses means and how upstream specifies them. Whether this is valid is really not addressed in copyright-format 1.0 by my reading. It's not clear that it's valid, and it's not clear that it's invalid. Lintian took a conservative interpretation. My recommendation would be, for the time being, to write this as: License: GPL-3.0 or BSD-3-clause or HIDAPI Comment: At the discretion of the user of this library, this software may be licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3, a BSD-Style license, or the original HIDAPI license as outlined in the LICENSE.txt, LICENSE-gpl3.txt, LICENSE-bsd.txt, and LICENSE-orig.txt files located at the root of the source distribution. These files may also be found in the public source code repository located at: http://github.com/signal11/hidapi . and then retain all of the separate License blocks. This is clearly allowed by copyright-format 1.0 and should be properly parsed by Lintian as well. In the long run, I would be in favor of making your approach unambiguously valid in a subsequent copyright-format 1.1 revision. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87a9e5p2wp....@windlord.stanford.edu
