Am 11.12.2017 um 18:44 schrieb Russ Allbery: > Markus Koschany <a...@debian.org> writes: > >> I have been working on ~500 packages during the past five years and I >> have never seen a package that used a different version of this license. > > That's surprising, since I maintain a package that has three different > versions just in that one package. Are you sure that every one of those > 500 packages said "THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS" in the last paragraph > and didn't substitute in their names?
I quickly checked the three example packages mockito, pyblosxom and kraptor and they use "THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS". I'm not sure why your upstream did replace this phrase but I consider this to be a bug and I would report it. I don't want to open another can of worms yet but I believe even if someone changed this phrase and we simply stated MIT as license in debian/copyright we still wouldn't violate any law because debian/copyright is something Debian specific which we impose on ourselves and not required by the license terms itself. The license simply requires: "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software." This is always satisfied as long as you don't remove the license from the original file. I would really appreciate it if we could get real legal advice and a clarification from a professional lawyer for this issue someday. > Humans will frequently not notice the differences. I have software that > constructs a debian/copyright file that requires a word-for-word match > with the license statement, so maybe this is more obvious to me? >> When upstream mentions the MIT license nowadays it is almost 100 % >> certain that they refer to this license. I know there are different >> wordings but that should not stop us from including the MIT-Expat >> license in Debian. > > I understand this desire for longer licenses. This one is three > paragraphs long. I really don't get why it's such a problem to reproduce > that in debian/copyright. This is probably not an issue for maintainers who maintain only a few packages which are relatively old and stable and don't change anymore. But if you really start to update ~1 package per day and are even one of those guys who convert debian/copyright to format 1.0 you will really appreciate any sort of time saving. There are projects like Minetest where people tend to license each and every image under a different license: WTFPL, MIT, LGPL, CC-BY-3.0, CC-BY-SA-3.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0, CC-BY-4.0, GPL-2+, etc. pp. Or take a look at ufoai and ufoai-data. I had to write an ufoai_copyright.py script to parse an upstream specific license file and to convert that into debian/copyright. 5000 files, 12 different licenses. I had to create my own "standalone_licenses" file [1]. That shouldn't be necessary, really. Netbeans comes with 80000 files. debian/copyright is > 110kb. I have recently decided to remove the (unused) demos from src:bullet because I spent more time on reviewing the debdiff and documenting new copyright holders and licenses with each new release because of them than it actually took to refresh the patches and compile the package. In a nutshell: Every bit of time saving is good. Any bit of simplification when creating and maintaining debian/copyright is good. I would also like to see that we can completely give up on stating: "On Debian systems, the full text of the foo license can be found in the file '/usr/share/common-licenses/foo'" This could be implicit when we change the copyright 1.0 paragraph from Files: foo.bar Copyright: 2017, Smith License: MIT "On Debian systems, the full text of the MIT license can be found in the file '/usr/share/common-licenses/MIT'" to: Files: foo.bar Copyright: 2017, Smith License: [MIT] Cleaner and shorter and sources.debian.org could parse [MIT] and link to the complete license text. I will file another bug report for that later. I will also file more license requests in the coming days. Regards, Markus [1] https://sources.debian.org/src/ufoai/2.5-3/debian/standalone_licenses/
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