On 11/24/2014 02:34 PM, Felix Schwarz wrote:
A while ago I noticed that a Debian package has some useful patches for some
package and some of these patches are required to update the Fedora package. I
was wondering if there is a summary about licensing of Debian patches and if
it is acceptable just to copy Debian's patches into Fedora (with proper credit
of course) [1].
The copyright status should be documented in the patches, or in
debian/copyright. If it is unclear, you can file a bug in the Debian
BTS. Just send email with a descriptive subject to
<submit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, and start the message with
Package: src:PACKAGE-NAME
(where PACKAGE-NAME is the source package in question), followed by a
blank line, and list the patches whose licensing you consider unclear.
I think most developers would assume that the patches are licensed under
the same conditions as the upstream code, though.
[1] I think the patches itself are fine to ship also considering the Fedora
upstream-first policy:
- patches have been submitted in the official issue tracker
- upstream project is pretty inactive but not dead
- patches are fairly small, mostly build-system changes for distributions and
fixing the test suite
You can also pretend that Debian is upstream. :-)
--
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security
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