I recently came across this bug report while working on cleaning up Lintian errors on qtwebengine-opensource-src.
The summarized version of the problem is that the file was originally licensed under a non- DFSG-free license, but was later changed by Unicode to be under a DFSG-free licence. Google has some discussion of the issue here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/google-breakpad/issues/detail?id=270[1] Based on what was documented, they changed the license of the file in their repository here: https://chromium.googlesource.com/breakpad/breakpad/+/ 14bbefbd9600e08d6a34d7250faa8bc9dba2113e%5E%21/[2] LLVM has recently changed the license of the code in their repository for the version 16 release: https://llvm.org/doxygen/ConvertUTF_8cpp_source.html[3] The text of the DFSG-free license can be found at: https://www.unicode.org/license.txt[4] The result is that some of the packages in Debian still have the problematic code listed in the header, but others do not. Packages with the non-DFSG-free license (correct Lintian positive): binaryen desmume funguloids libdbd-odbc-perl llvm-toolchain-9 llvm-toolchain-13 llvm-toolchain-14 llvm-toolchain-15 opencollada parser spring tla unshield zeek Packages with a DFSG-free license (false Lintian positive): firefox firefox-esr llvm-toolchain-snapshot qt6-webengine qtwebengine-opensource-src thunderbird It is easy to tell which packages have the problematic license because they contain the words “products supporting”, which phrase is not contained in the acceptable license. I propose that the Lintian check be modified to only flag files that contain “products supporting”. Once that change is made, I would be happy to work with the various maintainers of the problematic packages to help them get the correct licensing into their upstream files.
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
