AfferoGPL for Debian packaging work? [was: Re: libbitcoin license - AGPL with clauses added by SFLC and FSF]
Francesco Poli writes ("AfferoGPL for Debian packaging work? [was: Re: libbitcoin license - AGPL with clauses added by SFLC and FSF]"):
> On Wed, 21 May 2014 18:06:38 +0200 Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> > For the record, my concern was not the AGPL (I am a fan of that too, and
> > will most likely use it for my packaging work when Debian ships it in
> > common-licenses).
>
> Jonas, I hope you are not going to use the GNU AfferoGPL v3 for your
> packaging work, when the license of the packaged work is more
> permissive. I think that adding restrictions to a Debian package by
> licensing the debian/ directory content in a restrictive manner is not
> nice.
Speak as a fan of strong copyleft licences I actually agree.
If you put a strong copyleft licence on your packaging work, you
prevent it from being reused in other packages which pose similar
technical challenges but have an incompatible upstream licence.
For this reason I always use a permissive licence for packaging work.
Preventing my packaging effort being used for the packaging, for
Debian and derivatives, of proprietary works would be desirable.
But it is less important to me than enabling my work to be used for
all the variety of differently-licenced software in Debian. And I
also want my work to be useable for non-DFSG-free but non-proprietary
packages, some of which I do use (eg, GNU manuals, trn4, ...) and I
have no inclination to try to write licence text to distinguish these
cases.
Ian.
(carefully not having the AGPLv3 argument again)
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