Re: License of "debian/" directories

[Hong Xu]

On 10/8/20 3:10 PM, Joel Ray Holveck wrote:
> I'm currently asking my employer to let me upstream some changes I've got to 
> some Debian packaging.  Usually, they like to know what the license is.
> 
> What's the license of "debian/" directories in source packages?  Not for 
> native packages, but the packaging for third-party software.  Is it the same 
> as the upstream code, or does Debian own the copyright and have a particular 
> license for that, or what?
> 
> I looked over the Policy Manual and the Legal FAQ, but didn't see an answer.  
> Is this something that's been discussed before?
> 
> Best,
> joelh
Hi Joel,

This old thread is probably relevant: 
https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2018/09/msg0.html

Seems like this is a negligence in enforcing Debian developers to explicitly 
license the Debian package source files.

Hong

Re: Does Debian itself have a license?

[Hong Xu]

On 09/08/2018 09:51 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
> Hong Xu  writes:
> 
>> I understand that each piece of software has its own license in Debian
>> and they can be easily looked up. However, I have trouble finding the
>> license of the Debian itself, e.g., metadata of packages, default
>> configuration files created by the Debian project, etc. Can you
>> provide any information on that? Thanks!
> 
> My understanding is that the entire operating system is delivered as
> packages, and each package declares its copyright information in its
> ‘/usr/share/doc/$PACKAGENAME/copyright’ document.
> 
> The “metadata of packages” I am not sure what you mean? To my knowledge
> all the metadata is part of the source form of the package, and so is
> subject to the license conditions described for that package. Is there
> something else you refer to as “metadata of packages”?

The metadata of packages include information package descriptions,
dependencies, etc. that were created by Debian developers. It seems to
me that the copyright file of package does not describe the license of
this information since the copyright holder seems to be always the
upstream copyright holders. For example, /usr/share/doc/bash/copyright
reads "Copyright (C) 1987-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc." Although
the author of the packaging "Matthias Klose " is
mentioned, there is no license claimed for his packaging work.


> The same would be true for any default configuration files. They will be
> auto-generated (maybe even, simply copied) from some files installed
> from a specific package, and so are subject to whatever general license
> conditions apply for each package.

As far as I know, there are a lot of cases where default configuration
files in Debian are handcrafted, either from scratch or modified from
those in the upstream package. For example, the file octave.conf
(installed to /etc/octave.conf) in the source package of octave seems to
be manually modified from the upstream configuration file and its header
reads:

   ## This file is an extended copy of Octave's startup file at
   ## /usr/share/octave/${OCTAVE_VERSION}/m/startup/octaverc
   ## Configure readline using the file inputrc in the Octave startup
   ## directory.

While trivial modification should probably be fine, but I'm not sure
whether it's OK if a developer maintains a lot of packages and they are
put together in a distributed Debian system...

Hong

Does Debian itself have a license?

[Hong Xu]

Hi all,

I understand that each piece of software has its own license in Debian
and they can be easily looked up. However, I have trouble finding the
license of the Debian itself, e.g., metadata of packages, default
configuration files created by the Debian project, etc. Can you provide
any information on that? Thanks!

Example: Fedora provides a license for the compilation of the project:
; and so
does CentOS (License agreement upon first boot).

Hong