Re: Licensing of licenses

On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 05:48:05PM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
>>> 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?

As I said before, we prefer not to think about this.

>what is the risk that debian is concerned about here?

We explicitly aren't! It's only trying to discuss this produces more and 
more of strange questions not considered in practice.

-- 
WBR, wRAR

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