Debian: too free?

Posted Apr 29, 2004 22:05 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
In reply to: Debian: too free? by mbanck
Parent article: Debian: too free?

That's not actually true. The ability to produce derivatives of the GPL would not allow people to modify the license under which they received the code, just as changing the copyright tag in the document would not make it legal to do so.

This is purely a matter of RMS not wanting his license-writing work to be bent to different ends by users (i.e. copyright owners).

On the other hand, Debian packages don't, in general, include the GPL document itself; that is in /usr/share/common-licenses, and is distributed "along with" Debian, but not part of Debian; since Debian can't do anything to the document other than distribute it verbatim, it doesn't really make sense to consider it part of Debian. Debian packages include copyright notices which refer to but do not include the GPL.