On 2026-07-14 "Luke T. Shumaker" <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all,
> For decades, Debian had removed several programs from netpbm because > their copyright holder / license were unknown. Quoting the old > `debian/copyright` file: > > UNKNOWN, SO NOT DISTRIBUTED: > > > > The following programs are in the upstream source package, but do not > > have sufficient copyright and license information to be redistributed: > > > > pamchannel: No copyright / license text found > > pamtopnm: No copyright / license text found > > pbmto4425: No copyright / license text found > > pbmtoln03: No copyright / license text found > > pbmtolps: No copyright / license text found > > pbmtopk: No copyright / license text found > > pktopbm: No copyright / license text found > > ppmtopjxl: No copyright / license text found > > spottopgm: No copyright / license text found > (Of those, I believe that pamchannel and pamtopnm were erroneously > included in the list; but that the others are indeed not safe to > distribute. Most of them have authorship information, but no license; > while pbmto4425 has no authorship information either.) > However, when updating to netpbm 10.78 in 2020 > (https://salsa.debian.org/debian-phototools-team/netpbm/-/commit/fe0f4f186ace57995f9e0fd3d4c1da422c0c7457) > (included in Bookworm and later), these programs were re-added. > Looking at pbmto4425, pbmtoln03, and pbmtolps, I neither see updated > information in these files nor them being adequately addressed in the > current `debian/copyright` file. > Was there a discussion concluding that these programs are actually > DFSG-compliant, or was their re-addition an oversight? > Several other distros, including Parabola and Guix had been following > Debian's lead and removing those programs. I think the former two are false positives, both have been carrying this copyright/license header since the start of the SVN repo: ./other/pamchannel.c ./converter/other/pamtopnm.c By Bryan Henderson, San Jose CA 2000.08.05 Contributed to the public domain by its author 2000.08.05. cu Andreas
