On Saturday, January 10, 2026 3:20:44 PM Mountain Standard Time Peter Wienemann wrote: > Hi, > > given a project with a sizable number of files, many of them use a > BSD-4-clause license but there are variations in the development > organizations mentioned in clause 3. Is there an elegant way to document > this in a machine-readable debian/copyright file? Do I have to create > different stand-alone license stanzas for each variation or is there a > more efficient way to do it?
This is how SPDX handles it: https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-4-Clause.html The text in red is considered replaceable (variable) without changing the license. I do not know if there is a Debian wide consensus on this, but I would think it would be acceptable to include the standard template text as displayed on the SPDX website, and then include a comment that the licenses in the various files substitute the copyright holder name into their text, with a list of all the copyright holder names that are substituted. If some of the files vary in text that is not shown in red, I would add it as a separate license with a modified name. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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