Re: missing licence files and incomplete licence lists

[Dave Love]

Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Dave Love <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>> I realize that a lot of packages don't include licence files
>> (e.g. glibc).
>
> You mean ‘COPYING’ & co.?

Yes.

>> I'd mistakenly assumed that was automated according to the "license"
>> fields.
>
> Nope.  Outside of GNU there are no real conventions for license file
> names anyway.

Debian and SuSE both specify SPDX ones.  (There's been discussion about
using that for Fedora.)

That's orthogonal to the semantics of the field, though; if it's
misleading, that might be worse than not having it at all.

>> Also, some license fields aren't complete -- compare glibc's lgpl with
>> the contents of Debian's libc6 "copyright" file, which includes gpl,
>> bsd, and others, not just lgpl.
>
> Guix is much less comprehensive than Debian.  The ‘license’ field is
> meant to list the license that applies to the combined work.
>
> For glibc, it’s LGPLv2+; glibc includes BSD-licensed work, but that
> doesn’t matter from this perspective.

Is that based on FSF legal advice?  I think it needs to be if you want
to ignore what BSD licences say.  I'm afraid I'm old enough to remember
the BSD licence in a court case, without which the free software
landscape might be rather different, and the FSF campaigned against the
"obnoxious" advertising condition of original BSD.

>> Should bugs just be filed against each case, or can things be checked
>> systematically?
>
> Given the meaning of ‘license’ above, if you find errors, you’re of
> course welcome to report them.  But keep in mind that ‘license’ is
> looser than the info you’d fine in Debian ‘copyright’ files.

Is it meant to be equivalent of the RPM License field in Fedora/SuSE?
If not, exactly what does it mean?

Sorry if this seems too picky, but it's meant to be friendly advice from
long observation!  A GNU project should follow FSF legal advice, but I'd
expect Debian and Fedora to be fairly good models in the areas they
clearly agree.