On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 08:42:31AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
>...
> I searched for "All advertising materials mentioning features" in the
> Debian sources and it looks like the number of different copyright
> holders for which we accepted software under the 4-clause BSD may
> be not so large.
>
> So maybe the DFSG team could decide that we gave an exception to the
> DFSG to these copyright holders only, that we note that it pushes on our
> users the duty to check the copyright file of every package they use in
> case they want to mention them in advertisements, and that because this
> is too unreasonable we will not grant exceptions anymore to new
> packages, for the 4-clause BSD and for any other similar license?
>...
The DFSG are the fundamental definition of what we consider free
software. Either a licence is DFSG-free or it is not.
Decades of precedent cannot just be ignored, especially not by suddenly
declaring licences non-free that have been considered DFSG-free and used
in main for decades without changing the text of the DFSG.
Any exceptions (like the exception for patch licences in DFSG 4) would
have to be added to the DFSG by a GR.
Since the 4-clause BSD licence is an explicit example of a free licence
in the DFSG,[1] that makes it even more obvious that a change to the
DFSG to exclude 4-clause BSD would require a GR.
> Have a nice day,
>
> Charles
cu
Adrian
[1] the example in the DFSG cannot be 3-clause BSD since the listing of
the BSD licence in the DFSG predates the 3-clause BSD licence
