Jonas Smedegaard <[email protected]> writes: > I appreciate that upstream authors may have reasons to choose different > licensing, and am open to relicense non-packaging parts (e.g. patches).
I think the patches are the important part. In that specific case, if the upstream code is under a permissive non-copyleft license, I think it would be highly surprising to our users if your patches were under a copyleft license, thus effectively changing the license of the binary package to a copyleft license. Users are not going to expect that Debian is going to change the licensing of some package, particularly a well-known package, from, say, MIT to GPLv3. They are very, very likely to not check the debian/copyright file if they know the upstream license via upstream, and will just assume the Debian package is covered by the same terms under which upstream released their code. I think that if we did something to violate that assumption, it would be rather rude, even though it's often a legally permissible thing for us to do. If you're talking about just the Debian packaging files and you don't believe that affects the license of the resulting binaries (particularly for libraries and the like where they are often used as part of derived works), I don't think it matters what license you use as long as it's DFSG-free. I've encountered Debian packages like that before, where upstream is covered by a permissive non-copyleft license but the Debian packaging files (rules, etc.) are covered by the GPL. It's a little surprising but I can't think of any concrete problem it creates. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
