Re: Need advice: Package has a restrictive non-free modified MIT license

Maytham Alsudany <[email protected]> Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:02:46 +0800

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

Hi Aryan,

On Mon, 2025-07-21 at 07:24 +0530, Aryan Karamtoth wrote:
> The exact restrictive policy of the license is given below:
> "Human protect patch:
>  The program and its derivative work will neither be modified or
> executed to harm any human being nor through
>  inaction permit any human being to be harmed."

This undoubtedly makes the license and by extension the software non-
free.

[...]
> Hence, this is an important package that needs to be in Debian.   
> I need advice on how to proceed with this package as its a very
> important one and the downstream packages of this upstream package are
> very useful tools that need to be in Debian. 

I see you've already asked the author to reconsider, which is a good
first step.

v1.0.0 is the last version that uses the Expat (MIT) license unmodified
and is therefore free, so you can package that version of itertree
without issue and upload to main (though you won't be able to update it
further). You might have to adapt rdeps or patch it to be suitable
though.

--
Maytham

IANAL

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