On Sat, 31 Jan 2026 12:08, Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]> wrote:
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.
I would not be for such a strict proposal. Though I could get behind an
addition to policy like this:
"""
It's recommended to license the packaging work (i.e. the debian folder)
under the same terms as upstream. This ensures that cherry-picked
upstream patches do not cause a license violation.
For instance, if a project has the following copyright stanza:
Files: *
Copyright: 2020 Alice Dev
License: GPL-3
...
you might license the packaging work itself like this:
Files: debian/*
Copyright: 2026 Daniela Debian
License: GPL-3
"""
Might need better wording; ESL speaker here.
Also, as (random) datapoint:
AFAIK, the rust team, the GNOME team, the KDE team and the vim team
already use said licensing. Not sure about the other teams. When I
started contributing I was told to use this style.
best,
werdahias
