On Tue, Jun 16, 2026 at 09:48:56PM +1200, Andrew McMillan wrote: > On Tue, 2026-06-16 at 12:27 +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > > > the listing of the BSD license as an example of a free license in the > > DFSG predates the 3-clause BSD license, no BSD license with fewer > > than > > 4 clauses existed at that time: > > > > > > https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00017.html > > > > 4 Jul 97 > > > > The "GPL", "BSD", and "Artistic" licenses are examples of licenses > > that we consider "free". > > Perhaps we *should* have that GR, since all three of those licenses are > deprecated now, aren't they? > > If it were written today we would likely use a much different set: > > GPL-3 > LGPL-3 > Artistic-2 > BSD 3-or-fewer-clause > Apache-2 > OFL-1.1 > ODBL-1.0 > > And perhaps that would be enough exemplars - or perhaps not. It is > surely worth considering a GR to provide better exemplars.
I'd strongly disagree with that. The DFSG are a foundation document, not practical guidance. Practical guidance is at places like [1]. > We could add a clause saying that packages currently in Debian that are > licensed under the BSD-4-Clause are strongly encouraged to talk to > upstream about switching to the BSD-3-Clause, but otherwise we will > accept them as-is for the time being. Do you want to update the list of examples in the DFSG, or do you want to create a new version of the DFSG to change our definition of free software and overwrite 30 years of precedent? Changing after 30 years what is considered DFSG-free and what is not strikes me as a really bad idea, unless there is a very compelling reason why a change is necessary. A key benefit of the DFSG is that our users can rely on all parts of main compling with the DFSG, if we would change the DFSG to make advertising clauses non-free the main benefit would be that our users could then rely on no packages in main having a license with such a requirement - exemptions for any such package in main would be worse than the status quo. And no, this is not only about 4-clause BSD itself. If you want to change the DFSG or precedent of interpreting the DFSG, you also have to discuss bmagic and AGPL and gazillions of other licenses and how any change would affect them. I am not personally happy with all DFSG precedent, but the first question has to be whether any change is necessary at all since this would be huge project-wide discussions and changes. > Cheers, > Andrew. cu Adrian [1] https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ [2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2008/vote_003
