Svante Signell <svante.sign...@gmail.com> writes: > This is a puzzling question for me: If you are the copyright holder of > patches (they can be substantial) which license should apply?
Whatever license you want to put on it. However, it's going to need to be compatible with the upstream license or the resulting patched work will probably not be redistributable. > I have not seen this before, maybe I missed it. This question applies to > free as well as non-free packages. > 1) As a Debian patch, not forwarded upstream > 2) The Debian Maintainer forwards the patch upstream > 3) The patch submitter forwards the patch upstream > The third case might be clear, what about the other two? Actually, all of those cases are equivalent, and in all of those cases the patch author has the option of what license they want to use. It's conventional (although not entirely legally sound) in the free software community to just assume that any patch submitted without any explicit license statement is licensed under the same terms as the upstream source. But that's just an assumption, and if upstream is being legally conservative in their license handling, they would require explicit statements of license in any patch. Similarly Debian for patches that we apply at build time. And some upstreams are that legally conservative; ones that require either a copyright assignment or a contributor agreement, for example, will usually have, somewhere in that paperwork, an explicit statement concerning licensing that the contributor agrees to. But there is a grand tradition of not crossing this T in all cases, and being more formally precise about it is probably not a good use of project time. I for one don't intend to start asking bug submitters about the license on their included patch unless I have some reason to believe they don't intend it to be covered by the upstream license; I think that would be more annoying than helpful. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87vcb5oskc....@windlord.stanford.edu
