Re: Is there a list contains all debian packages and it's license ?

[Ole Streicher <olebole@debian.org>]

Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, 23 Sep 2017 at 10:25:33 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
>> Not a readymade solution, but perhaps a lead to follow: package copyright
>> info is supposed to be in a file debian/copyright within the package source
>> archive[1]. I don't know at the moment whether this info percolates to
>> the package binary when building.
>
> It does, and Debian Policy says it must. That information ends up in
> /usr/share/doc/${binary_package}/copyright where ${binary_package} is the
> binary package.

That is so only in theory. In practice, the machine readable copyright
file documents all copyrights of the sources, but does not have a
mechanism to tell which sources are at the end used for a specific
binary. It even documents source files that do not end up in any binary
package at all. And it does not document files that are not in the
source package but affect the copyright (unless one writes that in a
free-form comment).

For example, if you have a source licensed under BSD, and link it to
GPL, the resulting binary must be licensed under GPL (because it is a
derived work in the meaning of the GPL), but this is not documented in
the machine readable source file: there is just no place for such
information.

So, if you want to know, under which license a specific binary is
distributed, the realistic answer is: This is usually undocumented, one
has to check the licenses of the build dependencies, the license of the
source package, and the specific build process. Since build dependencies
are binary packages, this is recursive.

Best regards

Ole