Re: Licensing of licenses

Alex <[email protected]> Sun, 17 May 2026 12:13:37 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<87cxyuwdgu.fsf@t400deb>
>> On the other hand, "reuse-tool" does not recognize "d/copyright" as a 
>> license file, so it warns if there is no license for that file. 
>> Therefore, "spdx2debian" currently generates a license file for it using 
>> "CC0-1.0" as license and "None" as copyright holder. It is also a 
>> workaround.
>
> Why not exclude debian/copyright from "reuse-tool" coverage, instead of
> bogusly and confusingly inventing a licensing that noone granted?
>
> My guess is that your workaround was done to make the computed result
> appear perfect.  That seems to me to be the exact same reason for the
> question raised in this thread.

Under what circumstances does spdx2debian "invent" the licensing for
d/copyright? When the Debian source package is not itself REUSE
compliant, [spdx2debian wouldn't even run][0]. The solution for this
case, I [found to work well][1], is a REUSE.toml in debian/. I could
only reproduce the described behavior locally, when running spdx2debian
on a REUSE compliant upstream project (i.e. no debian/ directory) once
to generate debian/copyright and *then re-running* spdx2debian. I agree
with Jonas that coming up with a licensing for debian/copyright on the
second run is misleading. The default behavior for spdx2debian should be
that w/o additional work by the maintainer the project has just become
not fully reuse compliant (no copyright information for d/copyright
available) and therefore should error out accordingly.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/buhtz/spdx2debian/issues/9
[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/hyperorg/-/blob/debian/latest/debian/REUSE.toml?ref_type=heads 

> I maintain the tool "licensecheck" and chose to not invent licensing or
> copyright, but instead add FIXMEs to the produces output. Other tools
> has then emerged which takes the licensecheck output and "improves" it
> by stripping those FIXMEs :-)

xD - hope you didn't take that personally, Jonas! Thanks for your work on
licensecheck.
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 865 B)