Ben Finney <ben+deb...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: >Sven Bartscher <sven.bartsc...@weltraumschlangen.de> writes: >> but its content is not very overwhelming: >> >> Copyright <author> <year> >> BSD license ... >> I think this isn't sufficient to include the package in Debian. Is >> this right?
I think it's entirely fine. It's not clear just from that text exactly which BSD licence is meant but if this is made clear elsewhere by the copyrightholder then that makes the statement unambiguous. >Based only on that text? Yes, I agree. What other text in the work can >be unambiguously interpreted as a license grant? The text above is a clear statement that permissions is granted in accorance with the `BSD licence'. (Which might mean the 2-clause, 3-clause or 4-clause version.) There is no other possible interpretation of this statement by the author. The file `pqueue.cabal' (which the git records also show was written by the author and copyrightholder) clearly specifies `BSD3'. I would argue that even separately, the file `pqueue.cabal' is a human- and machine-readable statement of the licence for the work. It's in writing and when provided by the copyrightholder clearly intended as a statement of permission (which both humans and machines can be expected to rely on). But in this case it's not necessary to rely on that interpretation. Certainly, taken together, these two documennts, written by the author and committed at the same time (in commit c0e85fc), are a clear indication of permission to use the code in accordance with what is conventionally known as the 3-clause BSD licence. If you disagree I think that (even though this is probably easily fixed by a willing upstream) this might be a good example to ask a real lawyer about, to demonstrate that this kind of nit-picking is not helpful. Ian.