Is Packaging Copyrightable (was: is copyleft packaging bad for Debian?)

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Mon, 02 Feb 2026 11:01:05 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<6024046.usQuhbGJ8B@soren-desktop>
On Saturday, January 31, 2026 2:44:42 AM Mountain Standard Time Ilu wrote:
> 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.

From time to time I hear people make the argument that Debian packaging is not 
copyrightable.  I personally disagree with that assessment.  Among all the 
other possible factors for considering that packaging *is* copyrightable, I 
think the effort argument is the easiest to understand.

When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get the 
contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think it is 
impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that Debian 
packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just a set of 
default values that don’t represent any actual labor.  That fact that Debian 
packaging done well requires so much effort, and that it takes so long for new 
packagers to become good at it, is a strong indication that it is 
copyrightable.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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