Re: Bug#1135657: bmagic: DFSG Issues

On Tue, 2026-06-16 at 12:27 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>=20
> the listing of the BSD license as an example of a free license in the
> DFSG predates the 3-clause BSD license, no BSD license with fewer
> than
> 4 clauses existed at that time:
>=20
>=20
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html
>=20
> =C2=A0 4 Jul 97
>=20
> =C2=A0 The "GPL", "BSD", and "Artistic" licenses are examples of licenses
> =C2=A0 that we consider "free".

Perhaps we *should* have that GR, since all three of those licenses are
deprecated now, aren't they?

If it were written today we would likely use a much different set:

GPL-3
LGPL-3
Artistic-2
BSD 3-or-fewer-clause
Apache-2
OFL-1.1
ODBL-1.0

And perhaps that would be enough exemplars - or perhaps not.  It is
surely worth considering a GR to provide better exemplars.

We could add a clause saying that packages currently in Debian that are
licensed under the BSD-4-Clause are strongly encouraged to talk to
upstream about switching to the BSD-3-Clause, but otherwise we will
accept them as-is for the time being.

Cheers,
Andrew.

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