Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> writes: > Hi, > > Dave Love <f...@gnu.org> 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.