Re: Please review new license summaries for Debian

Jeremy Stanley <[email protected]> Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:17:00 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 2026-06-16 08:57:46 -0400 (-0400), Theodore Tso wrote:
>On Mon, Jun 15, 2026 at 08:29:49PM -0500, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
>>
>> Not to get pedantic, but if you *only* find a GPL-3 full text document in a 
>> repo without any indication in individual files as to how it applies to 
>> them, it may be entirely irrelevant anyway. As with a majority of popular 
>> free/libre open source licenses I've used, the instructions for applying it 
>> include indicators in the affected files. See 
>> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html where it states that you should 
>> "Give each file the proper copyright notices. Make sure to clearly identify 
>> which versions of the license users can use."
>
>It is amazing to me how many people are playing armchair lawyer on this thread.

Apologies, I should have indicated that my opinion was not intended 
as legal advice (though it didn't dawn on me that anyone might 
mistake it for that).

>It is what the GPL HOWTO states, yes.  Whether that is necessary from 
>a legal perspective depends on the legal jourisdiction and is a matter 
>of legal advice.  Most of us on the thread are not lawyers, and more 
>importantly, even if we are lawyers, we are not *your* lawyer.
>
>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.

In no way did I mean call anyone's upstream licensing practices into 
question. My point was simply that if you come across a project that 
has a COPYING (or LICENSE or whatever) file in it with only the text 
of the license and no indication there or elsewhere in the project 
as to how that license is to be applied, then there is possible 
ambiguity and your options are to either guess upstream's intent or 
seek clarification from them.

A number of projects I'm involved with upstream have different parts 
covered by a variety of (compatible) licenses, and if we didn't 
indicate within those projects how the licenses relate to the other 
contents we'd leave our downstream consumers to draw potentially 
misleading conclusions, so we get rigorous about including license 
preambles in each file. In the case of a GPLv2+ project, we're able 
to state in the files themselves (and also elsewhere in 
documentation) that later versions of the license are also 
applicable, or in a GPLv2-only project that they're not applicable.

I also find the Linux kernel's approach of placing a clear statement 
about applicable licenses in its COPYING file helpfully unambiguous, 
for what my non-lawyer opinion's worth.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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