Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > Are you suggesting that the DCO is a license text that has to be part of > the licensing information for a piece of work, and mentioned in > debian/copyright?
It struck me as a similar sort of thing on first glance, so I used your comment to make a broader point, but it sounds like this is a more complicated situation that I don't know anything about. I haven't done any research here, so I have no opinion about whether the DCO should be included in Debian packages or not. My general point is that we will need to have some exceptions for various reasons, and I'd rather document them explicitly in the DFSG rather than having a set of well-understood exceptions within Debian that aren't recorded where people would expect that information to be. I think that's in general alignment with your point. I will make the general comment that I think it's reasonable to care more about code or data that is integral to the functionality of something we package and less about ancillary files that aren't particularly important to the normal functioning of the package (such as files that exist only in source packages and don't contribute to the binary package). Bad licensing for the latter is still a bug, to be clear, but the centrality of the code or data to functionality does affect my opinion about the severity of the bug (unless, of course, we would get into legal trouble for distributing it at all). Upstreams put all sorts of weird things in source packages, so there will be a steady stream of bugs about files with odd licensing. We should strive to fix them all, but I would prioritize ones that affect the code that users run or the documentation that they read. Those are more central to what we're trying to accomplish as a project. That's why I'm particularly interested in the source for AI models and less worried about whether we manage to find and excise every poorly-licensed RFC in a Debian source package, although I agree that the presence of the latter is a bug and we should fix those bugs (but perhaps less urgently than fixing bugs where the code itself is not free). -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
