Re: Licensing of licenses

Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

> Richard Lewis <richard.lewis.debian-gM/[email protected]> writes:
>
>> 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?)
>
> debian/copyright frequently contains entire verbatim copies of licenses
> that aren't in common-licenses. Those license texts themselves may be
> under non-free licenses similar to how the GPL is.


But does that really mean debian/copyright itself is a derived work of
the GPL?

what is the risk that debian is concerned about here?