Re: is copyleft packaging bad for Debian?

Am 31.01.26 um 09:19 schrieb Arto Jantunen:
> Jonathan Carter <[email protected]> writes:
>> I agree with others that matching the package licensing is reasonable, although as we often see, bigger and larger
>> packages tend to have a mixture of licenses, in which case we typically choose the most free license for the package.
>>
>> Occasionally, I run into problems with more advanced packages, and then find that Arch Linux of Gentoo have found a good
>> solution to it, and I use it. When I've already spent some hours to a packaging solution in Debian, I want it to be
>> available as widely as possible to others in the same manner with as little friction as possible. So, I think if I had
>> to default on something else that "same as packaging", I'd use something like CC0 or something that is equally
>> permissive.
> 
> I recently thought about this specific problem for reasons I can't now
> remember, and arrived at the conclusion that CC0 is probably the best
> license one can choose for packaging.
> 
> For the most part the packaging is unlikely to be copyrightable anyway

^^ This.

> so assigning a license that has restrictions only makes things harder
> for the friendly folks who care about license compatibility and are
> unwilling to unilaterally decide that copyright doesn't apply.

Claiming copyright for something that is not copyright-able and then 
even putting restrictions on its use can be legally dangerous. Although 
it is a rare occurence, court cases have been lost in the past with 
expensive consequences for the person who tried to put restrictions on 
content that was - for whatever reason - part of the commons/public 
domain/not copyrightable.

> Potentially making things difficult for good free software citizens
> without in any way affecting the not so friendly folks seems
> counterproductive to me.
>