> We have never included licensing information for the license files > themselves, nor have we ever treated them as subject to the DFSG. If we > did, we would have to remove all GPL software from the distribution since > the text of the GPL is not DFSG-free, we could not distribute it under > DFSG rules, and therefore we couldn't distribute GPL-covered software > since we couldn't provide a copy of the license.
Sorry, I haven't referenced my [post to debian-devel][1] for context, in a response to which Ben pointed me to this bug. [1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/05/msg00168.html In short: I think - maybe wrongly - that we inadvertantly do make claims about the licensing information of license files with stanzas like File: * Copyright: Some Author <[email protected]> License: GPL3 whereby the GPL-3.0 license itself is included in the package as LICENSE, for example. > Maybe we should write this exception for license texts somewhere formally. > I can't imagine it ever changing. Me neither. I think it would be good to make this exception explicit in the policy but also carve out some handling in d/copyright, or at least not "force" per-package Lintian overrides onto maintainers for this specific exception handling. > I'm not familiar with the contents of those files. Insofar as they contain > license text, I think this is a variation of the same problem that > probably has the same solution. If they are just statements about the > copyright holders and names of licenses that are applicable, they're > probably not even copyrightable (mere recitations of facts are not > creative), but in general could probably be assumed to be under the same > license as the rest of the package, like we do with other documentation > files, unless there's some statement to the contrary. They are simply statements about copyright, not new licenses. Non-copyrightability of these files is another argument why I think there should be no expectation (e.g. via Lintian) to have to assign them any copyright information in the first place. -- Alex # No gods, no masters. # 47A5 9C45 FA69 E651 25ED 0B98 9891 FC5D 3C3C 4426
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