Simon McVittie wrote: > My understanding is that Markus' question in that thread was orthogonal: > "is the exact license grant really required, or is the license itself > enough?" (for terminology see my reply at > <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/09/msg00708.html>). > > I would also appreciate a canonical answer on that
A license grant is required. (I'm speaking as an end-user. I am not an ftpmaster, but I don't think that's particularly relevant.) Otherwise there's no clear indication that upstream was actually telling me I have permission to use, modify, and distribute the code under that license, instead of meaning to say, for instance, that that license is pleasant reading matter. An explicit license grant from upstream like "/* License: GPLv2 */" along with a pointer to the text in common-licenses seems good enough to me, though. Is that what you're referring to? I find the text "verbatim copy" from policy 2.3 to be problematic for reasons I've talked about before (summary: it's too vague), but I assume that's orthogonal to what you're talking about. Maybe there should be a footnote attached to "distribution license" saying that license text without context is not magical and we care about the actual license grant. Would that help? Thanks, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org