Edit: I should clarify that the implication of this would be that we are building all our packages with nonfree software.

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/44893
Allan McRae: "I'd find it difficult to believe that we could ever enforce a licence for a PKGBUILD. They are typically not substantial enough to have copyright."

This is a difficult question. Deciding that there is some lower bound for being substantial enough to be copyrightable would set a precedent that could cause problems in other areas. How substantial is most substantial PKGBUILD? How is that quantifiable?

I know that names, titles and short expressions are not copyrightable. (These can be trademarked) A PKGBUILD is typically much more substantial that that, however.

When a program is under a license such as the GPL3, every part of that program is protected. Even insubstantial segments of it are just as protected as the whole. I think this might be a question for the FSF.

iirc official arch pkgbuilds would be gpl2 since that was the license used by arch back when we started, but i can't find anything related to this, except for a guy believing the same as i.[^1]

i agree most of them aren't copyrightable... but ianal :)

i thought we discussed this when we applied for fsdg?

[^1]: https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/aur-general/2011-February/013653.html

here's the discussion about parabola on the gnu-linux-libre list: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2011-01/msg00023.html

i can't find any mention of pkgbuilds licensing...