Jonathan Carter <[email protected]> writes: > I agree with others that matching the package licensing is reasonable, > although as we often see, bigger and larger > packages tend to have a mixture of licenses, in which case we typically > choose the most free license for the package. > > Occasionally, I run into problems with more advanced packages, and then find > that Arch Linux of Gentoo have found a good > solution to it, and I use it. When I've already spent some hours to a > packaging solution in Debian, I want it to be > available as widely as possible to others in the same manner with as little > friction as possible. So, I think if I had > to default on something else that "same as packaging", I'd use something like > CC0 or something that is equally > permissive.
I recently thought about this specific problem for reasons I can't now remember, and arrived at the conclusion that CC0 is probably the best license one can choose for packaging. For the most part the packaging is unlikely to be copyrightable anyway so assigning a license that has restrictions only makes things harder for the friendly folks who care about license compatibility and are unwilling to unilaterally decide that copyright doesn't apply. Potentially making things difficult for good free software citizens without in any way affecting the not so friendly folks seems counterproductive to me. -- Arto Jantunen
