On Tue, 06 May 2025 at 17:12:12 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes:Debian is unusual in the way we interpret our mission statement as extending to everything we distribute being Free, not just our executable code.I don't think Debian is perfectly consistent in applying that principle: for example, the text of the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) is included in Debian packages (in 'main') and has a clearly non-free license, and IIRC sometimes not even in debian/copyright.
I think this is seen as part of making a wider exception for licenses and similar legal texts. The text of the GPL has similar wording, and we certainly can't be a legally-valid Linux distribution without shipping a copy of that.
There are other examples historically of similar content too, e.g., IETF RFCs and Unicode tables.
I believe project policy is currently that IETF RFCs under the "old" non-Free license, even if they are only in source packages, are a DFSG violation (although I'm sure there are plenty of undiscovered bugs for this topic, and I have no particular interest in proactively looking for them).
My understanding is that Unicode tables are under a Free license, and at least some packages go to significant effort to ensure that we have a preferred form for modification for their content (for example src:glib2.0 has a copy of the subset of unicode-data necessary to regenerate its internal tables, because the version of Unicode that it implements is part of its external API and should not be arbitrarily changed downstream, but we cannot guarantee that it will always be perfectly in sync with the current version of src:unicode-data in Debian).
smcv