On 15/11/11 20:40, Russ Allbery wrote: > Ximin Luo <infini...@gmx.com> writes: > >> The issue isn't whether they're the same license, it's whether they can >> be incorporated into the same License: paragraph. > > Those seem like the same issues. > >> As I pointed out already, your argument is inconsistent - "MPL or GPL or >> LGPL" allows relicensing as well, but DEP5 requires that we group >> together the uses of each component MPL, GPL, LGPL, separately. Why >> treat "GPL2+" differently? > > Because you can't do the same thing that you can do with that disjunction, > because there's no way to group the "+" part independently that makes > sense. > >> It's logically equivalent to "GPL2 or GPL3 or GPL4 or GPL5 ....".[1] > > Except that you can't write License stanzas for GPL4 or GPL5, so in > essence you have to treat GPL-2+ as a distinct license, since there's no > other good way to accurately represent it. It's a similar case to the GPL > v2 with an OpenSSL exception. >
There's a perfectly sensible way to represent it - write a stanza for GPL2, not
GPL2+. It's perfectly clear, just as the following is clear:
Files: X; License: A or B
License: A; fulltext
License: B; fulltext
Not having stanzas for 3,4,or5 is a different issue, and the separate-GPL2+
method has this issue too.
Files: X; License: A+
License: A: fulltext
vs
Files: X; License: A+
License: A+: fulltext
Please explain why the former version is somehow less coherent, or makes "less
sense". I already indicated why Jakub's example is wrong. For both "GPL2+" and
"GPL2", the full license text in question is the GPL2 as published by the Free
Software Foundation, and NOT the preamble added by individual software authors.
>> Why do you think separate paragraphs for GPL2 and GPL2+ is a good idea?
>
> I said why I think it's a good idea in my previous message. I understand
> that you disagree, but I'm not convinced.
>
>> Going back to the previous example, this sort of text:
>
>> | This program is free software; you can redistribute it
>> | and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
>> | Public License as published by the Free Software
>> | Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
>> | opinion) any later version.
>
>> should not be in the License: paragraph. It is not a summary of GPL2,
>> nor does it represent what it says, and it is *not* a license. Proper
>> licenses describe conditions for doing things to an *unspecified* set of
>> subject materials ("The Software" or equiv in legalese); by contrast,
>> the above text is preamble describing which licenses apply to which
>> particular materials, which would normally be on a file
>> header. Sometimes these things are merged, as is the case with shorter
>> licenses, but with legally-written license documents, they are
>> separated.
>
> I think this is an unuseful bit of nitpicking. It captures the licensing
> information for the software, and would contain the full license text
> except that you're allowed to replace that full license text with a
> pointer to common-licenses.
>
Nitpicking uncomfortable corners now saves headaches in the future; besides I
already proposed a solution, so why is it a problem?
The reason I know about this example is because I have already come across
similar situations. If you make the conceptual mistake of including preamble
with the license, you must have multiple license blocks for each preamble. You
said so yourself earlier - "if there are multiple different texts, there should
all appear".
For example, the MPL standard preamble lists all the different types of
authors, instead of being a general preamble. If you have 2 distinct premables,
it would be absurd to have both in the MPL License: paragraph, yet that is
exactly what above example suggests for GPL2. Example:
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, go find yourself a copy of the
MPL and scroll down to the bottom section, "EXHIBIT A -Mozilla Public License".
Specific instantiations of this are dotted around everywhere. It's clearly not
feasible to add all the preambles to debian/copyright, AND comply with DEP5.
> At the end of the day, the reason why you do it this way is because that's
> what DEP5 says that you should do, and the arguments for changing DEP5 for
> everyone are not sufficiently compelling (in large part because they
> create other problems, like how to not lose the "+" part of the
> description of the license).
>
You say "not sufficiently compelling", I hear "too lazy to do something about
it". The problems I described will only get worse with more packages.
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