Re: is copyleft packaging bad for Debian?

Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]> Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:08:04 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Quoting Arto Jantunen (2026-01-31 09:19:00)
> 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
> 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.
> 
> Potentially making things difficult for good free software citizens
> without in any way affecting the not so friendly folks seems
> counterproductive to me.

Would you (the plural you - all those responding so far, and everyone
reading this who has voting power in Debian) prefer that Debian
considered "too-strictly-free" packaging a release-critical bug and
reason for rejection in NEW queue screening?

My question was not which licens each individual developer would choose
but whether Debian as a project should consider copyleft licensing bad.
I understand and appreciate that we do not agree on what licensing is
ideal.

Imagine a proposal was made to extend Debian Policy with a rule, that
packaging must be upstreamable - i.e. that packages licensed more
strictly free than that of the contained project must be *rejected* at
the NEW queue screening, and packages already in the archive with such
"too strictly free" licensing should¹ be either corrected or dropped.

Would you vote for or against such a proposal?

 - Jonas

¹ Maybe very slowly - similarly to how we are still carrying fonts that
have source available but not yet are built from source, for many
years.

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/
 * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)