Quoting Arto Jantunen (2026-01-31 09:19:00) > 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.
Would you (the plural you - all those responding so far, and everyone reading this who has voting power in Debian) prefer that Debian considered "too-strictly-free" packaging a release-critical bug and reason for rejection in NEW queue screening? My question was not which licens each individual developer would choose but whether Debian as a project should consider copyleft licensing bad. I understand and appreciate that we do not agree on what licensing is ideal. Imagine a proposal was made to extend Debian Policy with a rule, that packaging must be upstreamable - i.e. that packages licensed more strictly free than that of the contained project must be *rejected* at the NEW queue screening, and packages already in the archive with such "too strictly free" licensing should¹ be either corrected or dropped. Would you vote for or against such a proposal? - Jonas ¹ Maybe very slowly - similarly to how we are still carrying fonts that have source available but not yet are built from source, for many years. -- * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt * Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/ * Sponsorship: https://ko-fi.com/drjones [x] quote me freely [ ] ask before reusing [ ] keep private
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