Re: licensing of debian/ files

[Michael Poole <mdpoole@troilus.org>]

Wesley J. Landaker writes:

> On Thursday 27 April 2006 05:41, Panu Kalliokoski wrote:
> > When discussing a package with my sponsor, I thought about a licensing
> > issue that has never occurred to me before.  Debian packages are very
> > careful to mention the license(s) and copyright(s) of the files in the
> > upstream distribution, but where are the license conditions of files
> > that the packager has added?  The manual page (if added by the packager)
> > usually gives something license-like in the author section, but what
> > about the other stuff?
> 
> "The first rule of debian/ directory licensing is, we don't talk about 
> debian/ directory licensing." ... =)
> 
> Seriously though, I think this is something we as maintainers should be more 
> clear about. I know in my packaging I always *intend* that my packaging 
> falls under the same license as the code I'm packaging.
> 
> But maybe it would be good to add this more specifically into the 
> debian/copyright file:
> 
> Original software, Copyright 200x Upstream Author
>   Upstream license text
> +
> +Debian packaging, Copyright 200x Package Maintainer
> +  Packaging license text
> 
> What do other folks think?

Many packages already have notices to that effect.  Partial results
from a quick grep: xutils and a lot of other XSF packages, openssh,
openoffice.org packages, and mailcrypt.  It's probably worth a best
practices entry in developers-reference.

Michael Poole