On the license of python-debian for use as a library

[Philippe Ombredanne]

Hi Stefano:

On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 9:31 PM Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at upsilon.cc> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Aug 13, 2019 at 04:32:26PM +0200, Philippe Ombredanne wrote:
> > If you are a copyright holder in python-debian, would you agree to a
> > relicensing such that it can be used as a library for projects using a
> > permissive, non-GPL license?
>
> Nope, sorry, I'd rather keep my contribution to python-debian under a
> GPL, copyleft license.

Thank you for the quick reply!
In earnest if you are not open to any change, this re-licensing
request is basically dead.

Note that I am not asking for a permissive license: I would be quite
happy with an LGPL or a linking exception to the GPL and I am fine too
if you feel strongly about any license change. We are not talking
about a lot of code in any case. For the parts I care for (e.g.
reading control, dsc and copyright files) there are about 1200 lines
of code and the part that is strictly about reading is likely much
less.

I would have preferred reusing and contributing back to this
project rather than re-writing some of my own parsing code though that
should not be too big an effort.

> But I encourage you to re-license any python-debian derived code under
> the same license :-)

That's a fair point, but I was making a case not only for my code but
other existing projects that use a permissive license and call
python-debian code.

FWIW,  "librpm" was made available by RPM authors under an LGPL
license to allow wider reuse as a library to build RPM-related tools
under any license but still keeping the code copyleft. This is the
kind of licensing that would make sense to me for a base package
manifest format library like python-debian.

--
Cordially

Philippe Ombredanne