Richard Lewis <[email protected]> writes: > Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:
>> 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. > But does that really mean debian/copyright itself is a derived work of > the GPL? > what is the risk that debian is concerned about here? Right, exactly. My argument is that there is no real risk here, and trying to precisely ascribe a license to every byte in the package is going to take people down some weird rabbit holes that don't help any of the expected consumers of the debian/copyright file. I agree that we should explicitly say in Policy that you can ignore the license of the license text itself when preparing debian/copyright. (As long as the license text can be redistributed, of course; hopefully no one would try to write a free software license whose text cannot be distributed.) -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

