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

Timo Röhling <[email protected]> Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:44:13 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Organization	The Debian Project
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi,

* Simon McVittie <[email protected]> [2026-04-28 16:51]:
>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.)

At least for the GPL family and Apache 2.0, the license boilerplate 
comes from a "how to apply these terms" section in the license appendix, 
which may not be legally binding, but makes the license easily 
recognizable. In your example, I am a bit uncomfortable with a single, 
typo-prone "+" sign carrying this much significant information about the 
license terms.

I would not mind if we stripped more boilerplate from d/copyright, but 
in the interest of avoiding ambiguity, I'd like for us to move to a 
widely used standard of license identifiers such as the SPDX ones, then. 
We could even adopt the SPDX-License-Identifier: syntax.


Cheers
Timo


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