Richard Lewis <[email protected]> writes: > why do we think the file d/copyright is itself a license?
> it is documentation of how to map between files and licenses. surely > d/copyright should be under the same license as anything else in the > debian directory? (Is is because it quotes text from the GPL? but a > quote is just a quote, and should be 'fair use' to include in a > non-GPL-licenses file, right?) debian/copyright frequently contains entire verbatim copies of licenses that aren't in common-licenses. Those license texts themselves may be under non-free licenses similar to how the GPL is. There's a parallel discussion of this on debian-policy at the moment where I am imploring people to not spend precious hours of life worrying about this. :) Historical practice in Debian is to simply ignore the license texts themselves for the purposes of generating license information because it adds complexity without adding clarity. That would include license texts embedded in other files like debian/copyright. In other words, license debian/copyright under whatever license covers the human creative input in organizing it (probably the catch-all license for all of the Debian packaging, whatever that is) and ignore the copies of license texts and don't worry about it. I realize this feels awkward and messy to folks who want to dot every i and cross every t, and I do understand that impulse, but also beware of false precision. The purpose of the debian/copyright file is primarily to reflect the license assigned by upstream, and the vast majority of upstreams simply do not license things with this level of precision. Indicating false precision in debian/copyright is therefore somewhat deceptive, however satisfying it may be. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
