Bug#694657: closed by Reinhard Tartler <siretart at tauware.de> (Bug#694657: fixed in libav 6:9.1-1)

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Fabian Greffrath (2013-01-14 13:41:08)
> Am 14.01.2013 12:07, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
> > I agree that debian/copyright is the best place to cover effective 
> > licensing, but I disagree that we whould do it before it is defined 
> > as the purpose of that file to cover *both* source and effective 
> > licensing.
> 
> But then, TTBOMK the effective license of a library does not only 
> depend on the licenses of the source files it is composed of. For 
> example, using a LGPL-2+ licensed library in software that is 
> Apache-licensed will turn the effective license of said library to 
> LGPL-3, because LGPL-2 is incompatible.

Yes - I did not mean to say that it was as simple as gathering together 
and look at all involved licenses - it is required also to look at *how* 
those licenses are used - e.g. which parts are linked together and which 
parts are maybe used only for commandline tools or internally during 
build for regression tests.


> However, I am afraid these are some corner cases that we simply cannot 
> cover in debian/copyright.

I agree that *current* policy for debian/copyright a) do not *require*
documenting reasoning of effects of our compiling binary packages from
the sources that we have been granted license to freely use, and
therefore it is unreliable to b) *maintain* such reasoning - because
each change to each explicit or implicit build-dependency may rewuire
new reasoning.

I do expect, however, a *future* policy which requires debian/copyright
be machine-readable.

...and I do imagine then an even more distant future policy additionally
requiring reasoned effective licensing be included in debian/copyright.

Today the burden of reasoning effective licensing is totally on users of
those binary packages - including other Debian packages build-depending
on them.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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