On Wed, 01 Aug 2018 at 19:23:09 -0700, Jonathan Nieder wrote: > Simon McVittie wrote: > > > ( ) the full text of the license, *and* the license grant > > (unless the license *is* the license grant, like BSD-style licenses) > > This wording confuses me. All licenses are license grants.
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 :/ """ > | 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. 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