Re: is copyleft packaging bad for Debian?

On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:08, Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>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.
>
I would not be for such a strict proposal. Though I could get behind an 
addition to policy like this:
"""
It's recommended to license the packaging work (i.e. the debian folder)
under the same terms as upstream. This ensures that cherry-picked 
upstream patches do not cause a license violation.

For instance, if a project has the following copyright stanza:


Files: *
Copyright: 2020 Alice Dev
License: GPL-3

...

you might license the packaging work itself like this:

Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2026 Daniela Debian
License: GPL-3

"""
Might need better wording; ESL speaker here.

Also, as (random) datapoint:
AFAIK, the rust team, the GNOME team, the KDE team and the vim team 
already use said licensing. Not sure about the other teams. When I 
started contributing I was told to use this style.

best,


werdahias