"Steve M. Robbins" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 11:18:24PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I don't think it makes sense to include in common-licenses something >> that's just a reference to other common licenses. It's not like the >> boilerplate text for Perl modules is long; it's only about six lines, >> and you'd still need to include at least a couple of lines to refer to >> the file in common-licenses anyway. > True. But as I carefully explained: in my view, it's not about saving > bytes; it's about labelling. And about avoiding copying errors, which > manifestly take place. Wouldn't http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat be a better way to address the labelling concern? As for copying errors, I don't disagree, but there are also a lot of Perl modules that *aren't* covered under the same terms as Perl or that have little niggling variations. We should also be including the copyright statements from the authors in the Debian copyright file. I guess I'm a bit skeptical that we gain that much in overall correctness in the copyright file by providing easy access to boilerplate for people to refer to. I'm worried that we'd just trade one form of errors (copying mistakes) for another (referring to the boilerplate when it isn't appropriate or without including sufficient information about the non-boilerplate parts, like the copyright statement). Of course, I'm one of those people who thinks that in retrospect we probably shouldn't have included the UCB BSD license in common-licenses either, although taking it out probably isn't worth the trouble. I think common-licenses is most useful for long license documents that would take up a measurable amount of the archive if they were duplicated in every package covered by them, and other goals, like labelling or machine-parsable copyright information, is better addressed in other ways. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
