From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mark H Weaver Subject: Re: w3m: 'license'; error: redefinition of 'struct file_handle' Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:28:09 -0500 Message-ID: <87y5esk9s6.fsf@tines.lan> References: <878v6spyx3.fsf@karetnikov.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([208.118.235.92]:40469) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1U5Vq9-0000A9-1g for bug-guix@gnu.org; Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:29:10 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1U5Vpb-0003BP-6i for bug-guix@gnu.org; Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:28:41 -0500 Received: from world.peace.net ([96.39.62.75]:45344) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1U5Vpb-0003A7-1n for bug-guix@gnu.org; Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:28:35 -0500 In-Reply-To: <878v6spyx3.fsf@karetnikov.org> (Nikita Karetnikov's message of "Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:26:00 -0500") List-Id: Bug reports for GNU Guix List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: bug-guix-bounces+gcggb-bug-guix=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: bug-guix-bounces+gcggb-bug-guix=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: Nikita Karetnikov Cc: bug-guix@gnu.org Nikita Karetnikov writes: > Also, I'm not sure what license should be used. Should we create a new > one? > > This page [2] states that w3m is under MIT, which is an ambiguous name > of the Expat License [3]. That's incorrect. While it is true that the Expat license is sometimes ambiguously referred to as the MIT license, it does not follow that everything called the MIT license is actually the Expat license. Many different licenses are ambiguously referred to as the MIT license. In general, you cannot trust a project's web page or any README in a source distribution. The only truly reliable method is to look at the copyright notices in every source file, but that's far too much work; we'd never get anywhere if we did that. The best practical resource I know of for this job are the Debian copyright files, which are in /usr/share/doc//copyright on a Debian system. They are also available by going to their web site: http://packages.debian.org/sid/ and then clicking on the "Copyright File" link in the right column. Debian is more consistently thorough in their research on copyright notices than anyone else I know of. The main caveat is that these files describe Debian's modified versions of the package, not upstream. Most notably, Debian may have removed code with objectionable licenses, and thus those objectionable licenses may not appear in their copyright files. A useful marker for this case is when you see "dfsg" in the binary package name (which most often means that GFDL-covered documentation was removed). Anyway, in the case of w3m, there are quite a variety of licenses used: http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/w/w3m/w3m_0.5.3-8/w3m.copyright I don't know how Ludovic wants to handle complex cases like this, so I'll let him chime in here. Thanks for your tireless efforts, Nikita! Mark