Re: Guidance Needed on Licensing for a Debian Package

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:07:53 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<2949140.FA0FI3ke8A@soren-desktop>
Raul,

On Monday, March 10, 2025 3:26:25 PM MST Raul G wrote:
> Hello again,
> Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
> 
> I'm amazed by the quantity of Debian documentation and tools available, and
> after an initial pass with 'decopy', I had to manually correct some entries.
> I also grouped the fonts by license type to improve clarity. I would really
> appreciate a final review of my debian/copyright file to ensure it fully
> meets Debian's expectations.
> 
> Link to the copyright text: https://paste.debian.net/1362371/

Your first stanza should be for:

Files: *
Copyright: 2025 Somebody
License: The main license of the project.

This is the main stanza for the project.  All the other stanzas are for exceptions.

The second stanza should be:

Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2025 You
License: Usually you want to make debian/* have the same license as the upstream 
project to make it easy to submit any code back to upstream when needed.

Other stanzas with identical licenses can be combined.  The way a debian/copyright stanza 
works is it says: all of the listed files are released under this license.  One or more of the 
listed copyright entries applies to each file.  You are free to use all of these files under this 
license.  If for some reason you need to relicense all of these files, you will need to contact 
all of the copyright holders listed.  If you only need to relicense some of these files, you 
will need to contact some of the copyright holders listed, but it is up to you to look closely 
at each file to figure out which of the copyright statements apply to the subset of files you 
are interested in.

So, for example, the following are from your example:


Files: Malayalam/Suruma.ttf
Copyright: 2015-2021, Sue Lloyd-Williams, Victor Gaultney, Steve Smith
License: OFL-1.1

Files: Hebrew/*
Copyright: 2016, Gili Levin, Shavit Yaacov (https://alefalefalef.co.il)
License: OFL-1.1


They could be combined into:

Files: Malayalam/Suruma.ttf
       Hebrew/*
Copyright: 2015-2021, Sue Lloyd-Williams, Victor Gaultney, Steve Smith
           2016, Gili Levin, Shavit Yaacov (https://alefalefalef.co.il)
License: OFL-1.1

An example debian/copyright you might find helpful:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/courier/-/blob/master/debian/copyright?ref_type=heads


Separate from debian/copyright questions, I notice that you have some OFL fonts with 
reserved file names.  This is one of my least favorite licensing scenarios, but it is possible 
to make it work with Debian main.  You might find the documentation I included with the 
fonts-adobe-sourcesans3 package helpful.

https://salsa.debian.org/fonts-team/fonts-adobe-sourcesans3/-/blob/master/debian/
README.Source?ref_type=heads

You might also find the debian/copyright for the fonts-adobe-sourcesans3 package 
interesting.  Because there are Multiple Upstream Tarballs (MUT) combined in this 
package, I chose to create a separate Files: stanza for each one, even though I could have 
combined them because they are under the same license.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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