Re: Concerning uniliateral decision making with respect to the coreutils package

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:58:06 +0300

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

On Mon, Jul 13, 2026 at 10:30:44PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
[snip]
> My point earlier in the thread was that by replacing (strongly) copyleft
> software by non-copyleft software (and I include weak-copyleft in the
> non-copyleft category) in Debian there is a risk the technical
> excellence of Debian will be used to subjugate users, and that
> eventually this could erode the foundation for why Debian is technically
> excellent in the first place.
[snip]
> I think a Debian core without any remaining (enforcable strongly)
> copyleft components a not unlikely scenario in the next ~10 years.  The
> move towards that has been happening for many years already, using
> various arguments including changing to "better software".  bash, gawk,
> wget, libgcrypt, info, etc.  The market forces are there to promote
> this.

Not commenting on your general point here, just... again, please stop
using libgcrypt as an example for that: most of it is weak-copyleft by
your definition above (LGPL-2.1+), and some of the most-often-executed
parts (e.g. some SHA-* implementations for amd64) are even under
a BSD-3-Clause license.

G'luck,
Peter

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Peter Pentchev  [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
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