Thanks for quick response :) On 17/12/11 21:45, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Ximin Luo wrote: >> On 12/12/11 01:19, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > >>> Perhaps a source of confusion is something Joerg wrote five years >>> ago[1]: > [...] >>> I continue to believe that what he meant is that such pre-made license >>> headers are good at covering their bases and that it is advisable to >>> take advantage of the work that was already done in writing them. > [...] >> Sorry, I didn't understand your point here. Are you saying it's better to >> include license notice as the actual text? I don't think "does not actually >> say >> that [..] applies [..] at all" is a problem - the File: stanza already takes >> care of that. >> >> For me, License: stanza is just a declaration of terms. > > Ah, thanks for your patience in clarifying. I misunderstood both you > and Charles before. > > So, the main change in practice that you are proposing is that > when reformatting a copyright file describing a project under the > GPL, packagers should not be allowed to write > > License: GPL-2 > This file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or > modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License > as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2. > . > This program is distributed in the hope that it will be > useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied > warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR > PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more > details. > . > You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public > License along with this program; if not, write to the Free > Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, > Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA. > . > On Debian systems, the text of the GNU General Public License > version 2 can be found at /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2. >
Under my proposal, I think the above is just about acceptable, but I'd recommend against it, since it doesn't represent GPL2 by itself - it contains extra information. However, I *would* forbid/discourage the equivalent text for GPL2+, because that explicitly mentions relicensing, which I think is more appropriately done in the File: stanza. I don't think this is the "main" point of my proposal :p the main point is to allow people to re-use License: paragraphs more effectively. I.e. not having to repeat themselves when some stuff is GPL2 and other stuff is GPL2+. > Instead, packagers would write something like this: > > Comments: > This file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or > modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License > as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2. > . > This program is distributed in the hope that it will be > useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied > warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR > PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more > details. > . > You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public > License along with this program; if not, write to the Free > Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, > Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA. > License: GPL-2 > On Debian systems, the text of the GNU General Public License > version 2 can be found at /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2. > > I don't see any compelling reason to _mandate_ that style immediately, > since as Charles mentioned, it does not much current practice. But I > don't see anything wrong with permitting it. > For this example, "GPL-2", I don't think it's a big deal whether to mandate this. However for the GPL-2+ case (and possibly others), I do think this should be the preferred approach - possibly even forbid License: stanzas for "GPL-2+" and instead use "GPL-2" with Comment: to clarify the relicensing under later versions. > That would mean removing the sentence > > This field should include all text needed in order to fulfill both > Debian Policy's requirement for including a copy of the software's > distribution license (12.5), and any license requirements to include > warranty disclaimers or other notices with the binary package. > > As you said, it does not match existing practice in the case of > BSD-style licenses anyway (for which a part of the required notices > tends to go in the Copyright field, not the License field). > > Illustrative patch follows. Sorry to have been so dense. > Looks good to me :) No need to apologise! There may be further changes to be made, I could look through in more detail when I have some more time. > diff --git i/copyright-format.xml w/copyright-format.xml > index 1f6c041b..069b022c 100644 > --- i/copyright-format.xml > +++ w/copyright-format.xml > @@ -474,12 +474,6 @@ License: MPL-1.1 > Otherwise, this field should either > include the full text of the license(s) or include a pointer to the > license file under <filename>/usr/share/common-licenses</filename>. > - This field should include all text needed in order to fulfill both > - Debian Policy's requirement for including a copy of the software's > - distribution license (<ulink > - > url="http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs#s-copyrightfile";>12.5</ulink>), > - and any license requirements to include warranty disclaimers or > - other notices with the binary package. > </para> > </section> > -- GPG: 4096R/5FBBDBCE https://github.com/infinity0 https://bitbucket.org/infinity0 https://launchpad.net/~infinity0
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