Re: is copyleft packaging bad for Debian?

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:54:16 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.project
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<4485332.CbtlEUcBR6@soren-desktop>
On Tuesday, February 3, 2026 12:11:57 PM Mountain Standard Time Russ Allbery 
wrote:
> In summary, personally I would align licensing between packaging and
> upstream when choosing a license because I think it makes everything
> simpler and more predictable, and when you are not getting legal
> agreements from contributors, I think one is under some degree of moral
> obligation to not do anything surprising. But I don't think it's some
> great sin if you don't do that, *provided* that you do not do things that
> cause surprising things to happen to the licensing of binaries produced by
> upstream.
> 
> And, in answer to your *actual* question, I think trying to explain all of
> these subtleties in debian/copyright is a lost cause and I am dubious you
> will gain all that much from trying. I think my best suggestion is to say
> that debian/patches/* is under the same license as the upstream code
> because this will almost always be correct in practice. Certainly if
> you're pulling those patches from upstream, that's a reasonable assumption
> to make. If upstream code is under a bunch of different licenses and the
> patches are therefore under a bunch of different licenses, I would
> probably do something annoying like list all the possible licenses as a
> conjunction (with "and") and then add a comment saying that each patch is
> under the same license as the file it is patching. (Or write separate
> license clauses for every patch, but gah.)
> 
> For the rest of the packaging files, I think you can do whatever you're
> doing now, but I would personally encourage you, at least a little, to
> consider aligning with upstream's licensing just on the grounds of
> reducing community friction and avoiding unpleasantly surprising
> contributors (and getting into extended and time-consuming discussions
> like this one). I personally think those benefits outweigh whatever
> relatively minor benefits you would get from choosing a personally
> preferable license for Debian packaging files where the precise licensing
> terms are unlikely to ever matter in practice. But this is just my
> personal opinion and the advice is worth what you paid for it. :)

Russ, thank you for the extensive analysis (of which, for space reasons, I 
have only quoted the final three paragraphs above).  I agree with your 
conclusions and appreciate your humor in explaining the complexities of this 
subject.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]
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