Re: GPL for package under MIT license upstream; repack?
On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 10:41:07AM +0200, Gard Spreemann wrote:
> A package I maintain (src:gudhi) was mostly under GPL-3+ up to and
> including the current version in the archives. Since then, upstream has
> switched to an MIT license, but with the caveat that many parts of the
> code has GPL dependencies and that "for practical purposes this code is
> GPL-3 for the user" [1].
>
> Instead of having to carefully figure out precisely which parts of the
> code should be considered GPL for the Debian package, I'm tempted to
> consider the whole codebase GPL for this purpose.
>
> Does this sound sane? Are there some particular steps I should follow?
> Should I create a Debian repack of the source where every file's
> copyright header reflects the above, or do I only need to do this for
> (header) files included in the binary packages? Or does it suffice for
> d/copyright to reflect it?
I don't think you need to (or even should) change the licence notices on
individual files. I would have thought that an indication in
debian/copyright would be enough to describe the effective licence for
the work as a whole; it's quite common for different parts of a work to
have different licences.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
Reply to: