Hello Debain Legal team,
I'm in doubt about the licenses of the packages virtualbox-ext-pack and
virtualbox-guest-additions-iso in the Debian repositories. Please see my
email below to the Debian Virtualbox team.
kind regards
Christian
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: License question virtualbox-ext-pack vs.
virtualbox-guest-additions-iso
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2022 13:54:01 +0100
From: Christian Kuka <christ...@kuka.cc>
To: team+debian-virtual...@tracker.debian.org
Hi all,
In our team we just came across the question which license apply to the
virtualbox debian packages and we were a little bit confused by the
copyright files of the virtualbox packages.
- For virtualbox-ext-pack, the copyright file is mentioning BSD-3-clause
as the license:
https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//contrib/v/virtualbox-ext-pack/virtualbox-ext-pack_6.1.40-1_copyright
- For virtualbox-guest-additions-iso, the copyright file is mentioning
Virtualbox-PUEL as the license:
https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//non-free/v/virtualbox-guest-additions-iso/virtualbox-guest-additions-iso_6.1.40-1_copyright
However, according to the description of virtualbox-ext-pack at
https://packages.debian.org/sid/virtualbox-ext-pack as well as at
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Licensing_FAQ only the "VirtualBox
Extension Pack" is licensed under the
"VirtualBox Extension Pack Personal Use and Evaluation License" and
VirtualBox base package (full source code and platform binaries) are
licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Thus,
"virtualbox-ext-pack" should mention PUEL in the copyright file and
"virtualbox-guest-additions-iso" should mention a different license?
Further, if that is the case, should "virtualbox-ext-pack" be moved to
non-free instead of contrib?
Is there a misunderstanding on our side or is there already a
clarification on the Debian pages?
kind regards
Christian
