Hello,
tl;dr: I'm trying to write the debian/copyright for a "use any license"
file.
This is the exact state of the file I'm talking about:
https://gist.github.com/PkmX/63dd23f28ba885be53a5/c89538c921f08f8dbb5bc5957c871060c720605a
This is the license header, in case you're too lazy to click the link:
"License": Public Domain
I, Mathias Panzenböck, place this file hereby into the public domain. Use it at
your own risk for whatever you like.
In case there are jurisdictions that don't support putting things in the public
domain you can also consider it to
be "dual licensed" under the BSD, MIT and Apache licenses, if you want to. This
code is trivial anyway. Consider it
an example on how to get the endian conversion functions on different platforms.
Now my question is: How should the entry in debian/copyright look like?
My best guess (if there was no mentoring system) is this:
Files: path/to/portable-endian.h
Copyright: 2013-2014 Mathias Panzenböck <[email protected]>
2015 PkmX <[email protected]>
License: public-domain-pe or BSD-2-clause or BSD-3-clause or BSD-4-clause or
Expat or Apache
# The licensing was meant to be "use whatever", but we have to keep it,
# verbatim. I took the freedom to interprete the term "the MIT licenses"
# as "Expat" in order to keep it reasonably small.
[SNIP all other files]
License: public-domain-pe
I, Mathias Panzenböck, place this file hereby into the public domain.
Use it at your own risk for whatever you like. In case there are
jurisdictions that don't support putting things in the public domain
you can also consider it to be "dual licensed" under the BSD, MIT and
Apache licenses, if you want to. This code is trivial anyway. Consider
it an example on how to get the endian conversion functions on
different platforms.
Specifically, I would like to know:
- Is this approach "A or B or C or D" acceptable, or did I misunderstand
something?
- Is my "Expat" interpretation acceptable?
- Is the naming "public-domain-pe" acceptable? The documentation [1]
says that I absolutely MUST explain what kind of "public-domain" this
is, and I believe this makes sure this is fulfilled.
- Shouldn't there be a system that allows the text of "known licenses"
to be left out? I haven't figured out how to make it work with lintian,
so my approach for all other files was to simply include the standard
text from the files provided by dh_make.
In other news: Sorry for the clickbait-y subject, but as this is about a
file with 6+ licenses but only 75 lines (says sloccount), it seemed
appropriate.
Cheers,
Ben Wiederhake
[1]
https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#public-domain
