fsfe / reuse-docs

REUSE recommendations, tutorials, FAQ and specification

https://reuse.software

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FAQ: handle license text templates like BSD/MIT #48

Closed smcv closed 3 years ago

smcv commented 5 years ago

The FAQ says:

Some licenses, such as MIT and the BSD family of licenses, have a line that says “Copyright © [year] [copyright holder]“. Please see this question about how to deal with those licenses.

where "this question" is a broken link to https://reuse.software/faq/#mit-bsd, an unanswered question that was commented out in commit eecb5ac5.

silverhook commented 4 years ago

Good catch. Thanks.

@carmenbianca, happy to work together on drafting an answer to that next month.

mxmehl commented 4 years ago

In a recent discussion, we've come to a preliminary conclusion how REUSE should deal with licenses like MIT that provide a template for someone to fill in copyright holder, year etc.

For new REUSE users, we recommend not to fill the template. Just download the license text and provide your copyright info like with any other license
For reused code under these licenses, out practical suggestion is to use the standard license text and take care that the original copyright holder is mentioned in the REUSE-style in the corresponding source code files
If someone really wants to be sure, the safe way would be to add these licenses as custom licenses with LicenseRef, so for instance for Bootstrap: LicenseRef-MIT-Twitter. We should explain the practical downsides of this option though.
Explain all of this in a FAQ entry, e.g. "How do I deal with license texts that contain copyright statements (e.g. MIT/BSD)?". We should make clear that this is no legal advice though.

silverhook commented 3 years ago

IIRC there is no issue with the 3.0 spec as things stand, but has anyone double-checked?

Love that this is getting fixed though! :D

smcv commented 3 years ago

IIRC there is not issue with the 3.0 spec

I think this is still a valid open issue. There does not seem to be any text in the REUSE 3.0 spec about how to handle something that's under a license consisting of (for example) a BSD license, with the replaceable text filled in differently.

For example, imagine some of the source files in my project start with a license grant similar to https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html, but instead of THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS it says THE ACME CORPORATION AND ITS CONTRIBUTORS. If I want to replace the text of the license grant with SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause to reduce the amount of boilerplate, I can't, because I'd be losing information (and arguably violating the license, because I'm no longer including "the following disclaimer" verbatim).

51 removed the text with the broken link, but didn't answer the question.

silverhook commented 3 years ago

I agree, this is still not fixed, but I’m just saying I don’t see a conflict with the spec if we do it as @mxmehl said, so it can be just done as a clarification. I would need to re-read the spec to make sure though.

IIRC the spec (and FAQ) currently just says to copy the plaintext SPDX template.

In your use case, I think what would need to be done is to have a separate LicenseRef-BSD-3-Clause-ACME.txt file and to be true to the spec, also use that basename as the license id tag.