GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 735882
Incomplete COPYING file shipped with tarball
Last modified: 2014-09-04 09:27:26 UTC
It only shows GFDL as License, but other parts use more licenses: - hig is now CC-BY-SA-4.0 - platform-demos -> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en - platform-overview and programming-guidelines-> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Thanks
It is not necessary to provide the full license text for CC-BY-SA-licensed content (although it is required for the GNU licenses), and the legal.xml (or similar) included with the hig, platform-demos and platform-overview includes the necessary text, linking to the full license.
Though it's not necessary to provide those license texts, the fact that the top-level COPYING is just the GFDL could lead somebody to mistakenly believe that all the documents are GFDL. I could easily see a packager making that mistake, because they're used to just looking at COPYING.
Yeah, that looked the case for Fedora when I tried to find all licenses information: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/gnome-devel-docs.git/tree/gnome-devel-docs.spec
(In reply to comment #2) > Though it's not necessary to provide those license texts, the fact that the > top-level COPYING is just the GFDL could lead somebody to mistakenly believe > that all the documents are GFDL. I could easily see a packager making that > mistake, because they're used to just looking at COPYING. True, but that also means that all GNOME applications which include user help are similarly in need of fixing COPYING (because the documentation is not under the GPL, which is traditionally the license that is found in COPYING). I think that is a problem, but one that is tangentially related to including the full license text in COPYING (or COPYING.FOO). It would be a good idea to have a GNOME-wide discussion about how to list project licenses (whether in COPYING, something like debian/copyright, DOAP files?), and I would prefer that to fixing just one module, especially if a decision is made to use a machine-readable format. (In reply to comment #3) > Yeah, that looked the case for Fedora when I tried to find all licenses > information: > http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/gnome-devel-docs.git/tree/gnome-devel-docs.spec Fedora updates most GNOME packages with a (dumb, in some ways) script, which does not check for license changes, although a run of the licensecheck tool, which checks the license of individual files in the packages, is required at package review time. In short, Fedora is pretty bad at updating project licenses when they change. Debian does a good job of checking licenses, and lists CC-BY-SA 3.0 as a license for (3.12) gnome-devel-docs: http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/g/gnome-devel-docs/gnome-devel-docs_3.12.2-1_copyright For documentation, "yelp-check license" is useful for checking licenses.
Thanks, I agree and I have just send a mail to d-d-l to try to reach a consensus about where to put information regarding licenses used by each package Regards
There did not seem to be much interest on desktop-devel-list, unfortunately: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2014-September/msg00011.html I went ahead and added some more information to COPYING, and moved the GFDL to COPYING.GFDL, and pushed the change to master as d7692612b3368e7294d613098fb6e799ccc2aa47.
Thanks a lot for taking care :)