Re: unknown license for package/debian/* in d/copyright in adopted package
On Wed, 04 Jan 2017 at 02:16:10 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> This benefit IMO far outweighs the risk that at some point someone
> will abuse our goodwill to make Debian-format source packages out of
> proprietary software. No-one, not even evil people, would want to do
> that.
As a consultant mostly working on Debian derivatives, I wouldn't agree
with that. Various non-evil[1] people make Debian-format source packages
whose upstream part is partially or entirely proprietary software, with
either Free packaging (common in Debian non-free), proprietary packaging
(which I seem to remember seeing in at least Maemo), or packaging with
no explicit license at all (which I've seen in at least Raspbian).
Putting a copyleft license on your favourite package's packaging is
not going to prevent that: Debian packaging is not difficult to
write from scratch, and even if it wasn't, there are plenty of
permissively-licensed packages available to base a proprietary
package on.
This also assumes that the parts of the packaging that might be copied
are even sufficiently creative to be eligible for copyright, which might
be doubtful in simple cases (in particular, maximally-declarative
packaging with dh).
I think a much more serious risk is that an insufficiently permissive
license results in inadvertent copyright infringement, avoidable duplicated
work, or avoidable bugs, in Free Software whose author is trying to do
the right thing.
When a licensed work represents an investment of time/effort/money that
is difficult or expensive to redo - most visibly, the Linux kernel -
copyleft is a valuable tool to encourage the production of more Free
Software. However, when an independent reimplementation of the work
only has a cost comparable to the time spent worrying about licensing
questions, copyleft is at best neutral, often an annoyance, and at worst
an active barrier to re-use.
I wonder how many debian/ directories the participants in this thread
could have written between us, under licenses of our choice, in the time
it took to discuss this?
S
[1] assuming for the sake of avoiding tautology that you do not consider
proprietary software to be inherently evil
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