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

Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:27:36 +0200

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

Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> writes:

> 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.

You are right - although I meant gpgv there, not libgcrypt.  The most
sensitive PGP parts is done in gpg(v) not in libgcrypt.  gpg(v) is GPL.

/Simon

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