Those words, in both the case of the DCO and GPL, are self-referential; you cannot modify the DCO or the GPL freely. You can modify the work the GPL covers, and the contribution in the DCO is generally licensed under the license of the project you're contributing to.
In that sense, the DCO itself and GPL itself are technically proprietary documents. This isn't a problem in practice, you should not modify these legal documents at home, that's a bad idea, and it's not a super important freedom to preserve. But if there's a technical concern distributing those documents with Debian because those clauses cause issues under the DFSG, that's something you'd have to figure out. On Mon, Nov 25, 2024, 12:18 Soren Stoutner <so...@debian.org> wrote: > On Monday, November 25, 2024 12:35:17 AM MST Simon Josefsson wrote: > > Hi. > > > > The DCO v1.1 published on https://developercertificate.org/ says: > > > > Copyright (C) 2004, 2006 The Linux Foundation and its contributors. > > Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this > > license document, but changing it is not allowed. > > > > The license appears non-free to me, does anyone disagree? > > I am curious as to what aspect of this license you consider non-free? I > am > not concerned about "Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim > copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.” Those > exact > words appear at the top of the GPL, which is considered a free license. > > https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html > > -- > Soren Stoutner > so...@debian.org
