About debian/patches/* licenses

[野崎耕平]

Hi,

In researching the licenses of the dependent libraries of the programs I created,
I noticed that some packages could be non-GPL library become GPL library by patch.

* The original project is not GPL
* There is a mention in the copyright that debian/* is GPL
* Patches to the library source code exist under debian/patches

So far I have found heimdal and libsqlite packages.

I feel that this is an unintended license change due to the addition of the
license description for debian/*.

Many projects are applying GPL2+ to debian/*, is there any recommendation?
Personally, I think there are fewer unintended accidents if LGPL is applied.

Package maintainers are encouraged to consider this...!

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, 2022-12-02 at 15:59 +0900, 野崎耕平 wrote:

> In researching the licenses of the dependent libraries of the programs I created,
> I noticed that some packages could be non-GPL library become GPL library by patch.

Generally Debian encourages maintainers to license their packaging
under the same license as upstream, so we can contribute back.
This applies to both GPL projects and non-GPL projects.

> So far I have found heimdal and libsqlite packages.

It might be a good idea to try and contact the patch authors for these
to ask them to relicense their patches and submit them upstream.

> I feel that this is an unintended license change due to the addition of the
> license description for debian/*.

Agreed.

> * The original project is not GPL
> * There is a mention in the copyright that debian/* is GPL
> * Patches to the library source code exist under debian/patches

This license mismatch issue should apply to all licenses not just the
GPL. A good way to detect future instances of this issue and report
them to package maintainers would be if the lintian tool were to
automatically check for it. Please file a bug report against lintian
asking for license mismatch detection to be implemented.

https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

--
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

[野崎耕平]

Thank you for your advice!

> It might be a good idea to try and contact the patch authors for these
to ask them to relicense their patches and submit them upstream.

>  A good way to detect future instances of this issue and report
them to package maintainers would be if the lintian tool were to
automatically check for it. Please file a bug report against lintian
asking for license mismatch detection to be implemented.

I will try to try about these.
Thank you again.

2022年12月2日(金) 17:26 Paul Wise <pa...@debian.org>: