Re: live-build copyright notices
On Tue, 2020-03-10 at 16:56 +1100, Michael . wrote:
> I think, I may be wrong so am happy to be corrected if I am, it is
> customary in Linux to acknowledge copyright of previous authors.
> Let's
> be frank and admit that if it wasn't for Daniel Live Build probably
> wouldn't have existed in the 1st place. I think removing
> acknowledgement of Daniel's copyright status while he was the primary
> author of the software would be nearly, but not quite, as bad as the
> way in which some people launched into an attempted take over of the
> live build name. Interestingly I'm not even sure if those people are
> involved in Debian Live at all anymore, not having heard a peep out
> of
> them with regards to Live Wrapper and its development for a very long
> time.
>
> I think, as a mark of respect to Daniel, the best thing the Debian
> community could do is leave Daniel's name on the copyright notice for
> the time he was the lead, if not the only, developer working on Live
> Build.
I'm not advocating removal of Daniel's copyright notice, the new notice
would add to it, just in the same way any fork of a project would
(which this essentially is now is it not?, except in terms of keeping
the same name which is not typical obviously), or any other modified
copy of a code file typically might be marked. I gave an example in the
original email of adding to the original.
i.e. of the form:
# Copyright (C) 2016 The Debian Live team <...>
# Copyright (C) 2006-2015 Daniel Baumann <...>
Placing this in the files indicates that all prior versions of those
files up to ~2015/2016 are copyrighted to Daniel, whilst the versions
published since ~2016 are copyright to the live build project/"team",
based upon that prior work. Why the team and not Raphael? Because while
Raphael is the only uploader of packages, there are other team members
who accept contributions and thus update the live-team published work.
After all any contributions that I personally make are being submitted
to the live team for consideration of inclusion in a future version
which they publish; I'm not submitting to Daniel; Daniel is not
involved with decisions of whether or not to accept my changes anymore;
it is not Daniel who publishes the new version with my changes. No bad
feelings towards Daniel at all here, just that I think that it is wrong
to be publishing modified works of his with his name being the one
still attached since they do not come from him and he could object to
such practice. Once modified these are no longer the copies of the work
_he_ published and licensed for distribution. These are copies that the
live-team are publishing, which have built upon his, but have been
modified, and should be marked as such.
Of course this not only applies to live-build, of which I've focussed
on but all live_* packages that hold similar attribution to him.
We could even consider the way things are currently as a licensing
violation. The 2015 copy of live-build was made available under a GPL
v3 license; if I remember my licensing correctly without bothering to
spend time double checking this, re-publishing with changes _requires_
clearly marking files as being modified by adding something making this
clear in the copyright/license notice block within the files. It was
concern about this that really inspired my email.
Notice that Raphael (the current single package uploader) correctly
modified the debian/copyright file of the package when he took over
that role such as to correctly attribute the newly published actual
packages,so there has been no problem with the package "wrapper" that
distributes copies of the program. He did so by _adding_ his copyright
on top of Daniels btw, not replacing Daniels.
I personally have no desire at all to detract from Daniel's role in
this project's existence, the work he did on it, etc. I'm not going to
comment on aspects of old arguments or bad feelings and do not wish for
discussion to head in such an unhelpful direction. All I am interested
in is ensuring that we are not making a mistake by misrepresenting
authorship of modified work and thus (unintentionally I am sure)
violating the licensing should we be doing so going forward.
I also have no desire at all to suggest that Raphael or the other team
members have acted at all wrongly in not yet making such a change.
I submitted the question simply out of the spirit of being helpful and
liking to fix things, along with being a contributor to this project
myself and thus with it affecting me personally wrt. how my changes are
published, it has been nagging me a little.
You mention live-wrapper; I've recently taken note of it, but failed to
grasp how it fitted into the live-* ecosystem from a brief look at
it... (perhaps if you want to comment on this to fill me in it might be
best to do so personally if there's some possibility of doing so openly
stirring up negativity?)
Regards,
Lyndon
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