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how to respect licensing for derived installer images?



Debian officially supports user-friendly automated installation. 
Documented way to enable automation involves passing a few options to 
the installer, which unfortunately is not user-friendly currently on 
some devices¹.  Alternative is to prepare² a user-friendly image ahead.

...which brings me to my question: How do I correctly publish a derived 
Debian install image?

I suspect the effective license of the combined work of the official 
Debian install images is quite likely some version of GPL, which means I 
will need to provide (or promise to provide) sources involved.

Since the "preferred form of editing" for my³ changes is the official 
binary images, do a link to those satisfy my obligations?

Or, if I need to provide source code for all pieces of the image, even 
though arguably I do not change any of it (only recodes their cpio and 
vfat encoding), how do I then enumerate what is involved?

Also, who decides what is the effective license of that work?  Should I 
have asked -legal@d.o? Or leader@d.o? Or is -boot@d.o or whichtever 
other team producing what ended up on our website the right ones to ask?


 - Jonas

¹ Concretely the Olimex OLinuXino A20 LIME2 board, for ShowMeBox: 
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/showme/box.git/tree/README

² Repackage snapshots of Stretch install image, extract and decode its 
bootloader hint file, adjust boot options, compile file, replace file 
inside initramfs cpio image inside vfat partition inside install image.

³ For work included with Debian we interpret "source" as the form which 
upstream prefers for editing.  But for work outside of Debian I guess I 
am free to choose to treat a different form as source.

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

 [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private

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