[mail fup to -legal] 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 archive 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. The copyright file in this example lacks some 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. - In the special care of GPL licensed programs it may lose information like 'GPL v2 or any later version', if that applies to your package. 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. Also read Andrew Suffield's mail on what you should do when writing a copyright file: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200312/msg00194.html Please do check that your packages' copyright files are ok, a large percentage is not. Peter
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