> How is the license of a binary Debian package determined? > > The file debian/copyright only contains the license of the sources; > however the binary license may differ -- f.e. when a BSD source is > linked to a GPL library. Also there is usually more than one license > used in the sources.
I'd say that it would probably be a matter of checking the license for all of the sources that were used to make the particular binary that you are concerned about - and then, checking the Debian dependencies for packages which your binary links to, in case there is a GPL-like linking clause. > Since Debian is a binary distribution, I am wondering if there is any > canonical way to get the license of a (binary) package? Not that I know of, unfortunately. Hopefully someone else will have an idea. That being said, if you distribute all packages with their sources and dependencies (and possibly a copy of /usr/share/common-licenses), you should probably be okay. (Of course, packages marked essential do not need to be included in the list of dependencies, so that could be a problem as well.) Honestly, though, I doubt that anyone is going to take legal action over something like this. They'd probably just ask you to change the license notice. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/546511bc.4030...@bitmessage.ch
