Bug#885698: What licenses should be included in /usr/share/common-licenses?

Mechtilde Stehmann <[email protected]> Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:02:01 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<59391d21-f82f-4ae1-ba10-17515bd282d2__34313.1279385247$1777277005$gmane$org@debian.org>

Hello

As a member of the new DFSG team, I would like to restart the discussion
from September 2023..

The issue at hand is the inclusion of additional license texts in the
base-files package.

In doing so, I would like to continue Russ Albery’s proposal [0].

Licenses will be included in common-licenses if they meet all of the
following criteria:

     * The license is DFSG-free.
     * Exactly the same license wording is used by all works covered by it.
     * The license applies to at least 100 source packages in Debian.
     * The license text is longer than 25 lines.

It also lists various reasons why it makes sense to include additional
license texts.

* Including long legal texts in debian/copyright, particularly if one
   wants to format them for copyright-format, is tedious and annoying and
   doesn't benefit our users in any significant way, and therefore we
   should include as many licenses as possible in common-licenses to spare
   people that work.

* common-licenses consumes disk space on every installed Debian system of
   any size, and therefore should be kept small to avoid wasting system
   resources.

The above reasons also make it easier for the DFSG team to review the
packages.

Even on our own systems, the licenses in question meet these criteria.

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/09/msg00055.html
-- 
Mechtilde Stehmann
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