Re: Licensing of licenses

Andrey Rakhmatullin <[email protected]> Sun, 17 May 2026 20:12:02 +0500

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 03:37:17PM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> The file d/copyright can't be licensed under CC0-1.0.
>>
>> Reason:
>> The freedoms granted by CC0-1.0 can't be applied.
>> CC0-1.0 grants the freedom to use, understand, distribute, and modify
>> the source code. However, it is precisely this last freedom that is
>> absent from most licenses.
>
>why do we think the file d/copyright is itself a license?
>
>it is documentation of how to map between files and licenses. surely
>d/copyright should be under the same license as anything else in the
>debian directory? (Is is because it quotes text from the GPL? but a
>quote is just a quote, and should be 'fair use' to include in a
>non-GPL-licenses file, right?)

Evidently, the tool that is being discussed uses practices that aren't
used in normal Debian packaging, such as not having Files: * and trying to 
list license/copyright info for individual files, thus not being able to 
use Files: * or Files: debian to cover d/copyright implicitly.

-- 
WBR, wRAR

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