Hi, On Mon, 2026-02-02 at 19:27 +0500, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote: > It wasn't clear that you explicitly exclude debian/patches/ from the > discussion and your questions. You even mentioned that "Sometimes I > proactively license patches potential for upstream adoption > same as upstream, but generally I don't".
Note that, for example, the GPL-2 contains this: "For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable." The Debian packaging is (IMHO) "scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable". Thus the GPL-2 requires these to be included under GPL-2-compatible terms. Using GPL-2-incompatible licenses such as the GPL-3-or-later thus makes it hard to comply with the GPL-2 (though so does statically linking GPL-3-or-later libraries like libstdc++, so maybe practically GPL-2 and GPL-3 should be considered compatible in Debian even if FSF might disagree). Unless the FSF fixes these problems (at least for -or-later) by releasing a GPL-2-compatible GPL-4. Ansgar
