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Re: Need advice: Package has a restrictive non-free modified MIT license




On 21-07-2025 16:32, Maytham Alsudany wrote:
Hi Aryan,

On Mon, 2025-07-21 at 07:24 +0530, Aryan Karamtoth wrote:
The exact restrictive policy of the license is given below:
"Human protect patch:
 The program and its derivative work will neither be modified or
executed to harm any human being nor through
 inaction permit any human being to be harmed."
This undoubtedly makes the license and by extension the software non-
free.

[...]
Hence, this is an important package that needs to be in Debian.   
I need advice on how to proceed with this package as its a very
important one and the downstream packages of this upstream package are
very useful tools that need to be in Debian. 
I see you've already asked the author to reconsider, which is a good
first step.

v1.0.0 is the last version that uses the Expat (MIT) license unmodified
and is therefore free, so you can package that version of itertree
without issue and upload to main (though you won't be able to update it
further). You might have to adapt rdeps or patch it to be suitable
though.

--
Maytham

IANAL

Yes, I'm hoping me and the author can come to a conclusion about this. I noticed that the downstream package only uses it for tests hence I temporarily excluded those tests. It's not really a very important package now but if the author can reconsider their license decision, I'll proceed with the packaging.

Yes, the v1.0.0 might be packaged but I do not see any value in it as I don't feel to go against the author's wish and like you said, it won't be updated further.

I was also suggested by people on debian-mentors to consider adding it to non-free sources but it wouldn't make any sense for a python library to be a non-free package when the sole purpose of it is to be used by other dependent packages which might be free.

-- 
Regards, 

Aryan Karamtoth
Debian Contributor
IRC: SpaciousCoder78

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