Re: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?

Hello Mechtilde,

2026-04-27 10:03 CEST, Mechtilde Stehmann:
> As a member of the new DFSG team, I would like to restart the discussion
> from September 2023..
> 
> The issue at hand is the inclusion of additional license texts in the
> base-files package.
> 
> In doing so, I would like to continue Russ Albery’s proposal [0].
> 
> Licenses will be included in common-licenses if they meet all of the
> following criteria:
> 
>     * The license is DFSG-free.
>     * Exactly the same license wording is used by all works covered by it.
>     * The license applies to at least 100 source packages in Debian.
>     * The license text is longer than 25 lines.
> 
> It also lists various reasons why it makes sense to include additional
> license texts.
> 
> * Including long legal texts in debian/copyright, particularly if one
>   wants to format them for copyright-format, is tedious and annoying and
>   doesn't benefit our users in any significant way, and therefore we
>   should include as many licenses as possible in common-licenses to spare
>   people that work.
> 
> * common-licenses consumes disk space on every installed Debian system of
>   any size, and therefore should be kept small to avoid wasting system
>   resources.
> 
> The above reasons also make it easier for the DFSG team to review the
> packages.

This is a great idea, especially for well-known licenses. Personally I
have been copy/pasting the SIL OFL license for many fonts, but I am not
sure it can be a candidate for inclusion.

When dealing with d/copyright and when a license is present on the
system, I am still puzzled if I should include a partial text of the
license [1], or just refer to the path on the system [2].

[1]

	License: GPL-2
	 This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
	 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, v2, as
	 published by the Free Software Foundation
	 .
	 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
	 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
	 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
	 GNU General Public License for more details.
	 .
	 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
	 with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
	 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.
	 .
	 On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public
	 License version 2 can be found in \`/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.

[2]

	License: GPL-2
	 On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public
	 License version 2 can be found in \`/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2'.

Since you studied the subject, I wonder which one we should recommend.
Maybe this is explained in the policy already, which I admit I did not
read in detail.

This change also questions what should be done with the packages in the
archive. As proposed in a thread you can initiate a mass-NMU for
updating the d/copyright files, or initiate a MBF with priority wishlist
maybe.

Thanks for working on this!

Agathe.