On Tue, 06 May 2025 at 17:12:12 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> writes:
Debian is unusual in the way we interpret our mission statement as
extending to everything we distribute being Free, not just our
executable code.
I don't think Debian is perfectly consistent in applying that principle:
for example, the text of the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is
included in Debian packages (in 'main') and has a clearly non-free
license, and IIRC sometimes not even in debian/copyright.
I think this is seen as part of making a wider exception for licenses
and similar legal texts. The text of the GPL has similar wording, and we
certainly can't be a legally-valid Linux distribution without shipping a
copy of that.
There are
other examples historically of similar content too, e.g., IETF RFCs and
Unicode tables.
I believe project policy is currently that IETF RFCs under the "old"
non-Free license, even if they are only in source packages, are a DFSG
violation (although I'm sure there are plenty of undiscovered bugs for
this topic, and I have no particular interest in proactively looking for
them).
My understanding is that Unicode tables are under a Free license, and at
least some packages go to significant effort to ensure that we have a
preferred form for modification for their content (for example src:glib2.0
has a copy of the subset of unicode-data necessary to regenerate its
internal tables, because the version of Unicode that it implements is
part of its external API and should not be arbitrarily changed
downstream, but we cannot guarantee that it will always be perfectly in
sync with the current version of src:unicode-data in Debian).
smcv