Re: Git branch layout for packages requiring DFSG-cleaning

Otto Kekäläinen <[email protected]> writes:

> Somewhat of a tangent, but I think it is already pretty well established
> that hosting a copy of upstream git on salsa.debian.org is acceptable,
> regardless of what files upstream has in their git HEAD or history. Only
> the stuff we upload to Debian archives is what we consider
> "redistribution".

I agree that this is what people tend to do, but legally this feels like
utter nonsense, so I'm worried that eventually we will be bitten by that.
I cannot imagine any reasonable legal interpretation of the term under
which Debian making the code available via Git from Salsa does not
constitute redistribution.

If the problem is only DFSG issues, then the law presumably doesn't care
if we're breaking our own rules. We can just say that the DFSG is ignored
for things hosted on Salsa, I guess, and that stance does have a lot of
practical benefits and probably not a lot of meaningful downsides.

But if the files really aren't legally redistributable by Debian at all,
or if Salsa violates some terms of the license, making them available on
Salsa is just as much redistribution as mirroring upstream's tarball
distribution point would be.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>