Bug#883731: audacious: Debian packaging has incorrect license

[John Lindgren]

Hi Nicholas,

> On this topic, would you please update contrib/audacious.appdata.xml
> to reflect the current Audacious license (GPL3)? It claims the
> project_license is BSD-2-Clause.

Sorry if my initial email was unclear.  The current Audacious license *is*
BSD 2-clause, with some exceptions:

1. The embedded copy of libguess (which is an external project) is under
   a BSD 3-clause license, with a separate copyright.  I believe this is
   not a problem so long as the libguess license is also included with
   any distribution.
2. Some of the more ancient plugins are under different licenses, including
   GPLv2+ and GPLv3.  When we relicensed the main parts of Audacious to BSD
   around 2012, we thought it impractical to contact all of the original
   plugin authors since some of them go back to XMMS days (20 years ago now).
   The plugins are compiled as separate binaries, and Debian has them in a
   separate package (audacious-plugins).

Our upstream COPYING file makes note of these exceptions, which is one
reason why it's important for it to be included verbatim, and not replaced
with generic BSD 2-clause text as it is in the current Debian package.

Regarding the plugins, I don't know the state of debian/copyright in the
audacious-plugins package, but my main concern here is that the one in
audacious is correct.

> However, shouldn't it say the following if Audacious' project license
> is GPL-3+ (drop the "any later version" clause for GPL-3 only) ?:

No, see above.

> Also, I found BSD-2-clause here: src/libaudcore/hook.cc,
> src/libaudcore/hook.h, src/libaudcore/output.cc, et al.

Those are correct.

> Conversely, what I found in debian/copyright was a project license of
> GPL-3, with notable exceptions. eg: are really translations GPL-1+?

As I said, debian/copyright is out-of-date.  We relicensed the project
from GPLv3 to BSD 2-clause back in 2012.  Possibly we didn't make an
obvious enough announcement back then for Debian to take notice.

Translations are under the same license as the rest of Audacious.

> To my eyes it looks like the upstream project license needs to be
> clarified and disambiguated, debian/copyright needs work, and finally
> that deduplication patch can be dropped.

Let me know if you think there are still clarifications needed upstream
given the information I've provided here.  I'd be happy to adjust things
as necessary.

Thank you,
John