On Tuesday, February 3, 2026 12:11:57 PM Mountain Standard Time Russ Allbery wrote: > In summary, personally I would align licensing between packaging and > upstream when choosing a license because I think it makes everything > simpler and more predictable, and when you are not getting legal > agreements from contributors, I think one is under some degree of moral > obligation to not do anything surprising. But I don't think it's some > great sin if you don't do that, *provided* that you do not do things that > cause surprising things to happen to the licensing of binaries produced by > upstream. > > And, in answer to your *actual* question, I think trying to explain all of > these subtleties in debian/copyright is a lost cause and I am dubious you > will gain all that much from trying. I think my best suggestion is to say > that debian/patches/* is under the same license as the upstream code > because this will almost always be correct in practice. Certainly if > you're pulling those patches from upstream, that's a reasonable assumption > to make. If upstream code is under a bunch of different licenses and the > patches are therefore under a bunch of different licenses, I would > probably do something annoying like list all the possible licenses as a > conjunction (with "and") and then add a comment saying that each patch is > under the same license as the file it is patching. (Or write separate > license clauses for every patch, but gah.) > > For the rest of the packaging files, I think you can do whatever you're > doing now, but I would personally encourage you, at least a little, to > consider aligning with upstream's licensing just on the grounds of > reducing community friction and avoiding unpleasantly surprising > contributors (and getting into extended and time-consuming discussions > like this one). I personally think those benefits outweigh whatever > relatively minor benefits you would get from choosing a personally > preferable license for Debian packaging files where the precise licensing > terms are unlikely to ever matter in practice. But this is just my > personal opinion and the advice is worth what you paid for it. :)
Russ, thank you for the extensive analysis (of which, for space reasons, I have only quoted the final three paragraphs above). I agree with your conclusions and appreciate your humor in explaining the complexities of this subject. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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