Re: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?

On Tue, 28 Apr 2026 at 16:40:21 +0200, Mechtilde Stehmann quoted:
>>	 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
>>	 with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
>
>><!--	 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA. -->
>         <https://fsf.org/>
>>	 .
>>	 On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public
>>	 License version 2 can be found in \`/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.
>
>I prefer the first part with the URL I 
>added. They don't have a postal address anymore

The example license header in the (L)GPL-3.0 replaces this with:

     You should have received a copy of [LICENSE NAME HERE] along
     with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

which seems like a better wording than inventing something 
Debian-specific.

But in any case I don't think this text is really part of the license 
grant (it's information for the recipient, but doesn't grant or deny any 
rights), so in recent d/copyright files I've just been quoting something 
like this:

License: LGPL-2.1+
  This library 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 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
  .
  This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
  Lesser General Public License for more details.
Comment:
  On Debian systems, a copy of the LGPL version 2.1 can be found in
  /usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2.1.

and if the DFSG team is happy with that, then I think that's a better 
approach than quoting either the advice to write to the FSF, or the 
address of the GNU licenses web page.

I think it would also be useful if the DFSG team could reopen discussion 
on #904729 about whether we need to quote the license grant at all. The 
last status of that bug (in 2018) is that it was blocking on receiving 
an official decision from the ftp team, but I believe that part of the 
ftp team's role has now been inherited by the DFSG team, so it would 
now be the DFSG team whose decision is needed.

If we were able to truncate the debian/copyright paragraph for LGPL-2.1+ 
down to something like this:

License: LGPL-2.1+
  On Debian systems, a copy of the LGPL version 2.1 can be found in
  /usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2.1.

or this (inventing a hypothetical syntax):

License: LGPL-2.1+
License-Text: file:///usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2.1

then that would make a typical d/copyright a lot shorter, easier for 
maintainers to write, easier for the DFSG team to review, and probably 
just as useful for Debian users. (The only information that would be 
lost is that the "+" indicates "or any later version", which would have 
to be out-of-band knowledge, e.g. mentioned in the copyright-format 
specification.)

Or, if we had a rule in the copyright-format specification saying that 
references to common-licenses don't need a standalone license paragraph 
at all, then we could just stop writing them (and update Lintian 
accordingly), except where they're needed to describe a license that is 
not present in common-licenses.

In the past, any suggestion of an improvement like this was de facto 
blocked by "the ftp team would need to say it's OK, and they haven't 
confirmed or denied that", but hopefully the DFSG team can break that 
deadlock by having a policy on what information is required vs.  
nice-to-have vs. unnecessary. I would appreciate it if the required 
category could be kept as small as possible, while still being 
sufficient for both our legal obligations and our self-imposed goals.

     smcv