Re: Please review new license summaries for Debian

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:37:26 +0200

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

"Theodore Tso" <[email protected]> writes:

> Having attended a number of Linux Foundation Legal Summits, which
> gathers together general counsels from many of the top lawyers in the
> field, and having received specific guidance from my company's Open
> Source Office, whose guidance was informed by my company's lawyers, I
> will state that this is not my current practice, regardless of the FSF
> might suggest in their GPL HOWTO.

So what is your current practice?

I agree that we won't reach any certainty on this topic, but what we
could do is to establish a set of "commonly practiced approaches" and
leave it at that.

This could help people to pick a common idiom rather than inventing yet
another variant that warrants discussion and considerations.  This allow
us to more easily say "hey that's not a common approach, please consider
if you really want to do that" in a friendly way.

I think it is acceptable -- and in typical Debian tradition -- if some
of the example approaches we suggest are in conflict with each other.

People will have different preferences and prioritized, and allowing
them to pick an existing idiom closer to their ideals seems better than
saying "you are on your own" which could lead to more complexity.

/Simon

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