Re: w3m: 'license'; error: redefinition of 'struct file_handle'

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Nikita Karetnikov <nikita@karetnikov.org> 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/<PACKAGE_NAME>/copyright on
a Debian system.  They are also available by going to their web site:

  http://packages.debian.org/sid/<PACKAGE_NAME>

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