Hello,

Must debian/copyright include the license grant?  Section 12.5 of the
Policy Manual does not make it clear whether the license grant must be
included.  If we want to implement anything like what's being discussed
in #883950, we need section 12.5 to state explicitly that the license
grant need not be included.

More generally, there is disagreement and confusion within the project
and in the archive about whether it must be included.  It would likely
make contributors' lives easier if section 12.5 were explicit about it.

What is the license grant?  Here is a DEP-5 stanza *with* the grant:

Here is a DEP-5 stanza *without* the license grant:

i.e. the license grant is the statement from upstream that the software
is licensed under a given license.  It does not form part of the license
itself.

Please note that this discussion does *not* block the merged bugs
#645696, #649530, #737796 and #786470.  The proposal there is simply to
document the License-Grant: field in the DEP-5 copyright format, a field
which is already in use in the archive.  That proposal does not settle
the question of the present bug.  Indeed, that proposal is just waiting
on refining the patch (Jonas Smedegaard is working on that here at
DebCamp) and there is no remaining controversy.  In this bug, by
contrast, nothing is yet clear.

Thank you to David Bremner and Stuart Prescott for noting that #883950
conflates the question of whether the license grant must be included
with questions about how best to extend the copyright format.  In fact,
we have to resolve the question of the present bug first.

Please try to restrict discussion in this bug to the abstract question
of whether or not the license grant should be included in
debian/copyright.  Please leave aside questions about the formatting of
debian/copyright.  We simply have to resolve the former question first.

<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883950#80> suggests
that the license grant is no longer required, which appears to be a
change in ftp team requirements since the previous official statement
<https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html>,
which said: "Its not enough to have the following two-liner ["On Debian
systems", etc.]. There are license headers [license grants], you should
use those".

ftp team: has the requirement to reproduce license grants for (some?)
licenses in d/copyright changed since 2006, or am I misunderstanding
the statement in #883950?

To make things easier, here are some possible policies that the ftp team
might reasonably choose:

* For common-licenses, d/copyright must include

  ( ) at least one of: a well-known license identifier like "GPL-2+"
      or a reference to common-licenses ("On Debian systems", etc.)
  ( ) a reference to common-licenses, and also at least one of:
      a well-known license identifier like "GPL-2+", or a license grant
  ( ) both a license grant and a reference to common-licenses
  ( ) something else (please specify)

* For licenses not available in common-licenses, d/copyright must include

  ( ) the full text of the license
  ( ) the full text of the license, *and* the license grant
      (unless the license *is* the license grant, like BSD-style licenses)
  ( ) something else (please specify)

Thanks,
    smcv

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=883950#80

I believe it shows the generally tendency that they are in favor of the
proposal.

Regards,

Markus

Hi,

Markus Koschany wrote:
reference to common-licenses being implicit.

Simon McVittie wrote:

This wording confuses me.  All licenses are license grants.  The issue
with having a (non-copyright-format) copyright file that simply states

|  On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in
|  /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2

is that that is just an irrelevant statement of fact; it doesn't tell
the reader what the license of the package is!  On the other hand,

| Files: *
| License: GPL-2+
|  On Debian systems the full text of the GPL-2 can be found in
|  /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2

in combination with

| Format: https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/

makes the intention very clear; the only potential icing on the top
would be if there were some file for users explaining how to interpret
this file.

Thanks,
Jonathan

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.)

This might be in the form

    """
    This program 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; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    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.
    """

or

    """
    This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share
    Alike 3.0 Unported license.
    """

but equally it might be

    """
    SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2+
    """

or even

    """
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001979.html>:
http://f0rqu3.deviantart.com/art/quake3-icon-64264660
      this is the one I made from the original logo
      and there is another in ioquake3 svn
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001980.html>:
      This is awesome, can I use it?
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001981.html>:
      I think he ment to use it under the GPL in ioq3 :)
      For normal use there is no need to ask...
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
    <http://icculus.org/pipermail/quake3/2007-September/001984.html>:
      yes. I cant choose GPL as license in DA so I use CC :/
    """

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.

(For clarity, I think what you said is a very valuable simplification,
and I would love to be able to stop copying and pasting upstreams'
license grant text.)

    smcv

Hi,

Simon McVittie wrote:

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

Hello,

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.

Yes.  I too very much hope we can improve the status quo.

I completely agree with Sean. This is a matter where policy must defer
to the ftp-master team.

Cheers,

I'm closing 1142696 as an almost-duplicate of 904729, with a comment
that I found uses of a 'Reference:' field and not only the
'License-Grant:' field mentioned in 1142696, see:

https://forgejo.debian.net/golang/golang-github-go-git-go-git-v6/commit/9cf508b3b3c2b0d83812c83d05af6966fa09ce14

I think 'License-Grant:' sounds more descriptive, but if it is supposed
to contain a link to a full license text, it doesn't seem like a license
grant, so still somewhat confusing.

There is no progress on 904729 since 2018.  Has anyone asked the new
DFSG Team about this?  Or is it still ftp-master who can decide on legal
matters?

/Simon

Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> writes:

Simon Josefsson [24/Jul 12:23pm +02] wrote:

No, it's them, it would be great if you could write to them, CCing the
bug.

ftp-master,

friendly ping to understand if you could make a decision if license
grants needs to be mentioned in debian/copyright files or not?

See https://bugs.debian.org/904729 for more context, and a better
explanation of the problem and question by Sean.

/Simon

Simon Josefsson [24/Jul 12:51pm +02] wrote:

Sorry -- this should be the DFSG-team now, not ftpmaster.