Re: compatibility matrix for /usr/share/common-licenses

Nicholas D Steeves <[email protected]> Tue, 02 Jul 2024 16:24:57 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi,

Thanks for your work.

"Serafeim Zanikolas" <[email protected]> writes:

> right, I guess that's why the wikipedia diagram distinguishes between MPL-2 and
> MPL-2-no-copyleft-exception. I think that we don't have to worry about that
> because spdx.org/licenses defines a distinct license identifier for the
> -no-copyleft-exception variant, and dep5 requires the use of spdx identifiers.
> (which is to say that we can assume that MPL-2 is in fact MPL-2 without the
> copyleft exception and therefore GPL compatible)

Would you please provide a citation for this update, because it looks to
me like DEP 5 only prohibits the redefinition of "a standard short
name", as well as defining the "trailing dot-zeroes" case.  "Standard
short name" presumably means that it is wrong to declare "License:
GPL-3+", but then use some-other license text; ie, well-known licenses
names cannot be redefined.  2.0.0 is equal to 2.0 and 2 for SPDX compat.
Other than that, I cannot see where DEP 5 necessitates the use of SPDX
identifiers.

In some cases, we actually prohibit SPDX idenfiers in Debian: For
example, "Licence: MIT" vs "License: Expat".  To the best of my
knowledge proponents of DEP5 retain the right to use Debian-specific
"standard short name[s]" rather than SPDX ones, and we don't have any
kind of official or unofficial SPDX-specific position other than the
"trailing dot-zeroes" case.

Did I miss something?
Nicholas

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