Debian GNU/Linux - License Information

General Information

This site contains information about various licenses that should help Debian maintainers to check for license or copyright problems before they upload a package into the archive.


DFSG-Free Licenses

The following licenses are considered OK for software to be included into the archive. Note that various licenses may have problems if they are combined with other licenses, so a listing here is not an ultimative guarantee that software will be included in the archive. Known incompatibilities are listed in the Problematic license combinations section.

Link License Name Version Description Status
bsdBSD 3-clause 3-clause BSD license (without advertising clause) reviewed
gfdl1.2GFDL 1.2 GNU Free Documentation License initial
gpl2GPL 2 GNU General Public License initial
gpl3GPL 3 GNU General Public License initial
lgpl2LGPL 2 GNU Library General Public License initial
lgpl2.1LGPL 2.1 GNU Lesser General Public License initial
lgpl3LGPL 3 GNU Lesser General Public License initial

Non-free licenses

The following licenses are not OK for software to be included into the archive. Some of them may be OK for inclusion into the non-free part, if so it will be shown in the description part.

Link License Name Version Description Status
none initial

Problematic license combinations

The following license combinations are problematic. Some of them are easily fixed if upstream adds an exception, some others do need a relicensing.

Link License Name Version Description Status
none initial

Copyright and other information

This site is prepared by the Debian FTP Master and FTP Assistants using ikiwiki with a plugin written for the license tables by Alexander Wirt formorer@debian.org. The Layout was created by Martin Ferrari tincho@debconf.org.

The information here reflects the viewpoint of the authors only, there may be any number of people disagreeing with it. Wherever needed and possible links to discussions in mailing-lists about possible problems with a license will be provided.

The license texts are all Copyright by their individual owner and are reproduced in their original form. Any possible comments are clearly marked as such in a comment-box like you should see near this paragraph, having a comment-text text in it. comment-text

The pages here are Copyright by their individual authors, the Debian FTP Master and FTP Assistants. Unless otherwise stated these pages, except for the reproduced original license texts, are licensed using the GNU General Public License, version 2.