Hi,
Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Wed, 01 Aug 2018 at 19:23:09 -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> Simon McVittie wrote:
>>> ( ) the full text of the license, *and* the license grant
>>> (unless the license *is* the license grant, like BSD-style licenses)
>>
>> This wording confuses me. All licenses are license grants.
>
> In the past, it has been asserted that maintainers are required to
> paste the text written by upstream that tells the consumer that they
> may redistribute the package under a specified license, verbatim,
> into the copyright file. That's what I meant whenever I said "license
> grant" on this bug. (Not to be confused with the text you can find in
> /usr/share/common-licenses, which tells you what the terms of the GPL
> are, but does not tell you that you can distribute any particular piece
> of software under those terms.)
Right: this involves a strange intersection of two requirements.
One is policy's "verbatim" requirement:
Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its
copyright information and distribution license
Another is a "common sense" requirement, which I'll put in my own
words:
A statement about where you can find a copy of the GPL does not
say anything about whether this package is under the GPL. So
we need more than that.
One way to handle them both is to include a verbatim copy of some text
from upstream indicating that the package is under the GPL. This is
what Joerg used to encourage packagers to include, for example in the
reject FAQ.
But since then, he has (fortunately!) relaxed a bit, and his more
current statements suggest that he views these two requirements as
independent. We need a verbatim copy of the license, for example as
included "by reference" from common-licenses. And we need a clear
indication that that license applies to this package, as provided for
example by the text
Files: *
License: GPL-2+
in a DEP-5 format copyright file.
Cc-ing him to allow him to correct me.
Thanks and hoping that clarifies,
Jonathan
