Hi Hong, On Sun, Sep 09, 2018 at 12:32:28PM -0700, Hong Xu wrote: > On 09/08/2018 09:51 PM, Ben Finney wrote: > > Hong Xu <h...@topbug.net> 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/$PACKAGENAME/copyright’ document.
Let's use the octave example. In /usr/share/doc/octave/copyright you'll find the section "Files: debian/*". This is the copyright for the Debian portions of the source package. Sometimes there were be debian/patches/custom_debian_config.patch which modifies the upstream source. Such patches also fall under the copyright of "Files:debian/*" unless otherwise specified. [1] Unfortunately the it's not nearly as clear for package which don't use copyright format 1.0... > > The “metadata of packages” I am not sure what you mean? To my knowledge > > all the metadata is part of the source form of the package, and so is > > subject to the license conditions described for that package. Is there > > something else you refer to as “metadata of packages”? > > The metadata of packages include information package descriptions, > dependencies, etc. that were created by Debian developers. It seems to > me that the copyright file of package does not describe the license of > this information since the copyright holder seems to be always the > upstream copyright holders. For example, /usr/share/doc/bash/copyright > reads "Copyright (C) 1987-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc." Although > the author of the packaging "Matthias Klose <d...@debian.org>" is > mentioned, there is no license claimed for his packaging work. It sounds like you're saying "metadata of the [binary] packages". They're not metadata for source packages, where they are actual files. Eg: '$ apt source octave'. In a non-native (the majority of packages) Debian source package the Debian bits are also in a separate tarball from the upstream one. eg: http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/o/octave/octave_4.0.3-3.debian.tar.xz vs http://http.debian.net/debian/pool/main/o/octave/octave_4.0.3.orig.tar.xz > > > 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: octave-4.0.3/debian/octave.conf. See [1]. Cheers, Nicholas
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