Hi all, I'm working with upstream of winetricks (in CC) on clarifiying/changing the license of some files.[1]
1. LGPL-2+ --> LGPL-2.1+ ======================== One has a notice for the "GNU Lesser General Public License" v2 (or later).[2] However in v2 the LGPL was the "GNU *Library* General Public License, while it only became the "GNU *Lesser* General Public License" in v2.1. The project ships a COPYING file[3] (since nearly the beginning of the projects history), identical to https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.txt It's clear that the project aims for license compatibility with Wine (LGPL-2.1+), but I assume this is not relevant for my first question: Is it ok to simply change the license notice to 2.1+? The current maintainer is not the original author (whom we've contacted), and more importantly the file had lots of contributors (too hard to contact all). I think this can be handled simply as a typo fix, given the name/version inconsistency and the content of the COPYING license. But then again the LGPL 2.1 states that we have to "[...] publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty[...]". 2. SPDX-License-Identifier ========================== Currently some files (small helper scripts, luckily only by authors we can ask for permission) have a custom license notifier for LGPL-2.1 only (but not later).[4] I'd like to change this (with the authors' permission). To respect the wish for a short license notice in these files, I've suggested to use the SPDX-License-Identifier instead: -# This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. -# -# This is free software, placed under the terms of the GNU -# Lesser Public License version 2.1, as published by the Free -# Software Foundation. Please see the file COPYING for details. +# SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+ and to add a note in COPYING: +Note: +Individual files contain the following tag instead of the full license +text. + + SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+ + +This enables machine processing of license information based on the +SPDX License Identifiers that are here available: +http://spdx.org/licenses/ I've seen this in other projects, but it seems not to be wildspread. Is this sufficient to determine the license? Is it sufficient to disclaim any warranty? Thanks in advance! jre [1] https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/pull/729 [2] https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/master/src/winetricks: # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or # modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public # License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either # version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later # version. [3] https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/master/src/COPYING [4] e.g. https://github.com/Winetricks/winetricks/blob/master/src/linkcheck.sh
