Jonathan Nieder <[email protected]> writes: > Charles Plessy wrote:
>> Sorry for the confusion between new field and new paragraph. Still, I >> think that we are spending a lot of time discussing refinements that >> need to demonstrate their usefulness by being adopted independantly by >> a broad number of package maintainers. > Stepping back a little, do I understand correctly that you mean "No, I > do not think License-Exception paragraphs would be useful"? > That's useful feedback and surprising to me. More details would be > welcome. I don't think they're particularly useful, mostly because I don't see a serious problem with the current syntax and therefore don't see a good reason to make it more complicated. There is an annoying corner case (multiple licenses that use the same exception but which aren't in common-licenses and therefore have to be quoted in their entirety) where not having this feature could result in serious copyright file bloat. However, I think this is rare. Most license exceptions are used with the GPL, which is in common-licenses, so the License blocks are short and duplicating them is not much wasted space. The argument against them is that a license with a license exception is only two separable components if the license says that it is. In most cases (such as GPL v2 with an exception), it's really a brand new license that happens to share a lot of characteristics with the base license. Separating out the language so that it's presented in separate paragraphs, which I think is the key point of having this feature, runs the risk of not correctly reproducing the *actual* license text in the copyright file. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
