Bug#950678: licensecheck: misdetect BSD license (quote issue ?)

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Dominique Dumont (2020-02-05 09:48:36)
> On Tuesday, 4 February 2020 19:37:36 CET you wrote:
> > Do you agree with my interpretation?
> 
> yes. 
> 
> I wonder how I did not see this difference ...
> 
> Anyway, this clause is seldom used. A search on the web finds that 
> this clause is used by GLEW (OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library).
> 
> I wonder if this license should be considered as a BDS-2-clause or yet 
> another BSD mutation which should be copied verbatim in 
> debian/copyright...

I checked and found that ScanCode - a competitor to Licensecheck with a 
big testsuite - mis-detects that pattern as bsd-new (a.k.a. 
BSD-3-Clause), and reported that as a bug: 
https://github.com/nexB/scancode-toolkit/issues/1889

Turns out that the pattern is a specific author making a mistake that 
was quickly corrected when aware of it: 
https://github.com/chemeris/msinttypes/issues/7 and b)

Current view of Philippe Ombredanne (author of ScanCode) is that it 
should be treated as BSD-3-Clause (since that was the intended 
licensing) - I am of the opinion that it should be treated as a 
variation of BSD-2-Clause (since in my understanding that is what it 
legally is) and I think our scanners could then optionally hint at the 
meta level about _why_ it is a mutation (e.g. flagging it as "imperfect" 
as per my idea about "qualities" - see bug#950363).


 - Jonas

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

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