At least this is not the case of Debian. As I previously said, Debian as a
distribution or any other distributions *cannot* have an overall license.
Every distribution is made up of various software. Debian must respect the
original upstream license of each software and must not alter them. If the
upstream license is not reasonable or considered "non-free", Debian would
decide not to include it into Debian's "main" section. As far as I know,
Debian never declared itself to be released "under GPLv2" or any other
licenses. When you are logging in from terminal on Debian devices, the
following greeting information will pop up
Hi,
在 2019-12-06五的 11:06 +0900，JungHwan Kang写道：
> Thank you for your answer.
>
> > 2019. 12. 6. 오전 12:57, Boyuan Yang <byang@debian.org> 작성:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > Disclaimer: the canonical answer to license issues should be given by
> > debian-
> > legal mailing list (https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal). There might be
> > errors in my words below.
> >
> > 在 2019-12-06五的 00:10 +0900，JungHwan Kang写道：
> > > Hi, Debian forks.
> > > I know Debian has GPLv2.
> >
> > My personal understanding is that "Debian" is never ever specifically
> > released
> > under certain license ("GPLv2" or anything else). I have never heard of
> > the
> > saying that "Debian is under GPLv2" or "Debian has GPLv2". Debian is made
> > up
> > of tens of thousands of individual packages and each package has its own
> > license recorded in debian/copyright file and you may find that file as
> > /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/copyright when the package is installed on
> > your
> > system.
>
> Is this the license policy for debian below?
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guidelines
The official license policy documentation is published here:
https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/ . The Debian Free Software Guidelines
are some high-level guides that are accepted across Debian but they may not be
the precise description of Debian's license policy.
> > > There are many packages having a different license in the Debian
> > > distribution.
> > > How to resolve a conflict between licenses to specify GPLv2?
> > > For instance, GPLv2 & GPLv3 are incompatible.
> >
> > I never heard that GPLv2 license and GPLv3 license are incompatible.
> >
> > The real example of incompatibility should be OpenSSL and GPL (
> > https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html) or GPL and CDDL
> > (
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/687550/). Debian is aware of those issues and
> > these
> > issues have been taken care of already.
>
> I mean if there is a Linux distribution released under GPLv3, the
> distribution isn’t able to include packages under GPLv2.
> https://images.app.goo.gl/cqzufQ1c7CHP8dNL6
> The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
> the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
> individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
>
> Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
> permitted by applicable law.
It only describes the individual licenses of each software and there's never
an overall license for Debian itself.
As other developers said previously (in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/12/msg00034.html ), "...shipping
two packages whose licenses are incompatible... is never a problem. An
incompatibility can only be triggered when you actually 'combine' the two
packages...". As a result, it's okay for Debian to *ship* both GPL-2-only
packages and GPL-3-only packages. We are talking about shipping only, not
about compiling or linking; the latter case would indeed be a violation of
licenses.
Aside of that, If you do find any software provided in Debian is using source
code that are licensed under conflicting licenses (e.g., combining GPL-2-only
AND GPL-3-only source codes to generate a package) or linking two
binary/libraries that are using conflict licenses (e.g., OpenSSL library and
original GPL-licensed software, as described in
https://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html) , please file a bug
against that software in Debian with high severity ("serious"); please also
write to the debian-legal mailing list to report such license violation.
Debian treats those concrete license violations seriously.
Feel free to let me know if you have other questions.
--
Best,
Boyuan Yang