I was looking at Lintian’s source code to prepare a patch that would correct these false positives and I realized that Lintian doesn’t actually check for the presence of the problematic license at all. Rather, it was checking for some text that appears at the bottom of convert_UTF. Probably because they were worried that the words in the license file were too common and they didn’t want false-positives (which is what they ended up with anyway).
So, I corrected the check to actually look for the problematic license and then ran the patched version against the qtwebengine-opensource-src package, which is one of the packages that had the false positive. This removed the false positive, but I was surprised to find that it discovered four other affected files in the package. E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/ 3rdparty/chromium/third_party/breakpad/breakpad/LICENSE] E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/ 3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_10-1998.ucm] E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/ 3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_11-2001.ucm] E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/ 3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_14-1998.ucm] One of these is a summary license file, but the other three are data files that contain the problematic license in their headers. This made me start to wonder how many other files in Debian also have the problematic license that have gone undetected because the Lintian check was not well formatted. In the case of these files it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Unicode also relicensed them under a DFSG-free license at some point. I am going to work with upstream to determine if that was the case and, if so, correct the license. Otherwise, I will work with upstream to see if there is some DFSG alternative to these files. Given the fact that this license extends beyond the convert_UTF file, I am planning on amending my patch to rename the check to something more generic, like license-problem-unicode and updating the description of the tag. For anyone coming to this bug report with questions about the status of a particular Unicode license, the problematic license contains the following statement: > Unicode, Inc. hereby grants the right to freely use the information > supplied in this file in the creation of products supporting the > Unicode Standard This is not DFSG-free because it restricts the users from using the source code in ways that do not support the Unicode standard. This phrase does not exist in the license that Unicode adopted later and which they relicensed their files to use. -- Soren Stoutner so...@stoutner.com
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