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

Mechtilde Stehmann <[email protected]> Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:28:57 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<8a3a7876-00ff-4290-8978-101ec90c0be9__14063.3398828626$1777303885$gmane$org@debian.org>

Hello,


Am 27.04.26 um 15:22 schrieb Santiago Vila:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 03:09:54PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
>> On Mon, 2026-04-27 at 14:52:41 +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
>>> On Apr 27, Mechtilde Stehmann <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> The issue at hand is the inclusion of additional license texts in the
>>>> base-files package.
>>
>>> I think that there was a consensus back then and there is still one now.
>>> Do you volunteer to NMU base-files, if the maintainer is not
>>> interested in working on this?
>>
>> Uh, what? I'm pretty certain Santiago would be happy to update
>> base-files *once* debian-policy has been updated, but certainly not
>> before. So instead of unnecessarily throwing shade, perhaps get
>> debian-policy updated first?
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> Here is a quote from base-files FAQ for those who never bothered to read it:


You can find the following text under

https://salsa.debian.org/sanvila/base-files/-/blob/master/debian/README
> Q. Why isn't license "foo" included in common-licenses?
> 
> A. I delegate such decisions to the policy group. If you want to
> propose a new license you should make a policy proposal to modify the
> paragraph in policy saying "Packages distributed under the Apache
> license (version 2.0), the Artistic license, the GNU GPL (versions 1,
> 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), and the GNU FDL
> (versions 1.2 or 1.3) should refer to the corresponding files under
> /usr/share/common-licenses". The way of doing this is explained in the
> debian-policy package. As usual, you should always take a look at
> already reported bugs against debian-policy before submitting a new
> one.
> 
> 
> If somebody has a problem with me delegating the decision to the
> policy group, they should say so in a clear and non ambiguous way.
> 
> Thanks.
> 

-- 
Mechtilde Stehmann
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