Bug#883731: audacious: Debian packaging has incorrect license

[Francesco Poli]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2017 22:39:41 -0500 Nicholas D Steeves wrote:

> Dear Debian Legal Team,

Hello Nicholas, John, and everybody else reading this.

I would like to send some comments of mine, here.

Please note that: not only I am not a lawyer, but, even more
importantly, I am not your lawyer, nor a lawyer of the Debian Project.
Also, I am not a member of the Debian Project: I am just a Debian
external contributor, who happens to be a regular on the debian-legal
mailing list...

> 
> I've CCed you for my reply to this bug, because I don't have the
> experience to be able to tell if Debian implicitly relicensed
> Audacious as GPL-3 from 2012-2016,

As far as I can tell, *maybe* the implicit re-licensing was done by
distributing the audacious Debian package with the incorrect
debian/copyright file.

> how potentially falling out of
> BSD-2-clause license compliance might have affected this,

Failing to retain the license text in the package distribution is in
fact lack of compliance with the 2-clause BSD license, I would say...

> and also how
> this should be resolved.  The Debian packaging is GPL-2+, so it's
> possible to move to copyright-format/1.0 if that would simplify
> things.

I personally think that the first thing to do is an accurate copyright
and licensing status review of the audacious package, so that the
debian/copyright file may be fixed to reflect the actual current state
of affairs.
The Audacious upstream developers may be willing to help, by clarifying
any doubts upon request.
This may be a perfect opportunity to switch to the [machine readable]
format.

[machine readable]: <https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/>

After a fixed audacious package is uploaded to Debian unstable and
migrates to Debian testing, the most offending issue should be solved,
I suppose.
At that point, the Audacious upstream developers may be willing to
forgive the Debian Project for the past incorrect copyright information.

If that is deemed to be needed or useful, it could be feasible to also
fix the debian/copyright file for audacious version 3.7.2 in a Debian
stable update (and possibly also address the same issue for
oldstable)... On the other hand, this extra effort could perhaps be
considered not worth doing.

> Also, please reply to point 2. OTTO "ancient plugins...under
> different licenses.  I assume audacious-plugins will also need a
> copyright review.

Probably.

> Please CC John and I, Bug #883731, and
> debian-legal as appropriate.

Done.

I hope my comments may help.

Bye and thanks to the Debian Multimedia Maintainers for the time they
spend in maintaining a number of great Debian packages, and to the
Audacious upstream developers for the time they spend in
developing/maintaining that very nice audio player (that I personally
use everyday!). Thank you!


-- 
 http://www.inventati.org/frx/
 There's not a second to spare! To the laboratory!
..................................................... Francesco Poli .
 GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82  3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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