[I intent to send this to debian-devel-announce, please tell me if I'm
completely wrong]
Hi,
when reviewing several NMs' packages I came accross many broken
copyright files in recent weeks. Upon investigation I found that many
(many!) copyright files in the archives are not really any better.
This is an example on how _NOT_ to do it:
| This package was debianized by....
[..]
| Upstream Authors: Donald Duck, Daisy Duck
|
| Copyright:
|
| On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License
| can be found in the `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL' file.
This lacks some quite important information:
- who owns the copyright. This must give the year and the copyright
owner.
- It does not really say that the software in question is licensed under
the GPL, and it loses information like 'GPL v2 or any later version'.
A proper copyright file looks like this:
[...]
| Authors: Donald Duck, Daisy Duck
|
| Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001 Donald Duck
| 2000, 2002 Daisy Duck
|
| This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
| it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
| the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
| (at your option) any later version.
|
| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
| GNU General Public License for more details.
|
| You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License with
| the Debian GNU/Linux distribution in file /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL;
| if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place,
| Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
|
| On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public
| License, version 2, can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.
Peter
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