On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 06:15:54PM +0800, Sean Whitton wrote: > Hello, > > On Thu 02 Aug 2018 at 10:14AM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > > > 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.) > > > > [...] > > > > The reason I am being so pedantic about this is that previous statements > > from the ftp team have implied that paraphrasing the license grant text > > provided by upstream (for example simplifying "This program is free > > software; etc." into "License: GPL-2+") is not acceptable, and I want > > to be sure that this rule has intentionally been changed. > > Right. > > In my role as one of the maintainers of Policy, I do not consider the > single e-mail we have from Joerg in the other bug sufficient to confirm > that we can write in Policy "The license grant need not be included." > > Given that the ftp-team have previously explicitly said that the > paraphrasing is not acceptable, we need an explicit statement that their > view has changed. > > I hope that those driving this proposal do not find this too > frustrating, but we would really not be improving things if we added > that statement, only to find packages being rejected from NEW because > their copyright files did not include license grants. We need to be > sure.
I completely agree with Sean. This is a matter where policy must defer to the ftp-master team. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.
