Bug#1111126: Policy change and technical adjustments

Alex <[email protected]> Sun, 17 May 2026 01:01:13 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.policy
Message-ID	<87h5o7ufgm.fsf__12000.9092193627$1778972966$gmane$org@t400deb>

> We have never included licensing information for the license files
> themselves, nor have we ever treated them as subject to the DFSG. If we
> did, we would have to remove all GPL software from the distribution since
> the text of the GPL is not DFSG-free, we could not distribute it under
> DFSG rules, and therefore we couldn't distribute GPL-covered software
> since we couldn't provide a copy of the license.

Sorry, I haven't referenced my [post to debian-devel][1] for context, in
a response to which Ben pointed me to this bug.

[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/05/msg00168.html

In short: I think - maybe wrongly - that we inadvertantly do make claims
about the licensing information of license files with stanzas like

File: *
Copyright: Some Author <[email protected]>
License: GPL3

whereby the GPL-3.0 license itself is included in the package as
LICENSE, for example.

> Maybe we should write this exception for license texts somewhere formally.
> I can't imagine it ever changing.

Me neither. I think it would be good to make this exception explicit in
the policy but also carve out some handling in d/copyright, or at least
not "force" per-package Lintian overrides onto maintainers for this
specific exception handling.

> I'm not familiar with the contents of those files. Insofar as they contain
> license text, I think this is a variation of the same problem that
> probably has the same solution. If they are just statements about the
> copyright holders and names of licenses that are applicable, they're
> probably not even copyrightable (mere recitations of facts are not
> creative), but in general could probably be assumed to be under the same
> license as the rest of the package, like we do with other documentation
> files, unless there's some statement to the contrary.

They are simply statements about copyright, not new
licenses. Non-copyrightability of these files is another argument why I
think there should be no expectation (e.g. via Lintian) to have to
assign them any copyright information in the first place.

-- 
Alex
# No gods, no masters.
# 47A5 9C45 FA69 E651 25ED 0B98 9891 FC5D 3C3C 4426

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