Re: Licensing of licenses

Richard Lewis <[email protected]> writes:
> Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

>> 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?

Right, exactly.

My argument is that there is no real risk here, and trying to precisely
ascribe a license to every byte in the package is going to take people
down some weird rabbit holes that don't help any of the expected consumers
of the debian/copyright file.

I agree that we should explicitly say in Policy that you can ignore the
license of the license text itself when preparing debian/copyright. (As
long as the license text can be redistributed, of course; hopefully no one
would try to write a free software license whose text cannot be
distributed.)