On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 10:07:45PM -0500, Barry deFreese wrote: > Bas Wijnen wrote: >> On Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 02:53:48PM -0500, Barry deFreese wrote: >> - Only one copyright claim, for "XLife". It seems to be about the >> entire program. However, there is also a list of other authors >> without a copyright claim. >> > I don't see any other claims of copyright. How do I verify that? Well, normally with only one copyright claim, you can assume that this person (or entity) owns the copyright on the entire program. In this case, this is unlikely because: - Some parts of the code have been written by others. - The license which is chosen seems to be a "I don't care about copyright" type, which is mostly intended to keep the lawyers away. (This is my interpretation, not necessarily theirs.) - For one person to hold the entire copyright when multiple people have written code, a copyright transfer must have taken place. I find it unlikely that these people took the trouble to do that. For the parts you own the copyright on, you can even be sure that you didn't transfer copyright. :-) >> - A license for the only copyright claim. This seems to be about the >> entire program. If this is correct, that is good. :-) However, all >> copyright holders need to agree. It's probably a good idea to send >> them (and Jon Bennett, too) a mail asking them who they think holds >> copyrights on (parts of) the code, so this can be properly noted. Oh, and of course if they hold copyright, they should confirm that they released the code under the same license. > Again, I see the other authors mentioned but no claims of copyright? That's exactly my point. I think they meant to claim copyright that way, but legally they didn't say so. That's why it'd be good to check. > BTW, I notice in the machine readable format that there is no Author: > section. Is that correct? This could indeed be an interesting optional field to add. It is legally not very meaningful, but it is interesting information in many cases (when the copyright was transferred, but attribution is appreciated). The proposal is a wiki, so I suggest you add it somehow. I'm not sure how such changes should be proposed, but adding this optional field would probably be uncontested, I think. If you don't want to add the field, you can just add the information as a comment at the top or the end of the file (in an "unparsed" section). >> - The license doesn't seem to be about the Debian packaging. A license >> is needed for that as well. The most usual choice is "the same as the >> program", but this must be explicitly done by the people who wrote the >> packaging. >> > So I need to try to track down the original maintainer and ask them > about what license to put the packaging under? Yes. If you can't reach them, I think it is safe to assume that the program's license was used. It would be good that you write this assumption down as well in that case, so it can be corrected when more information becomes available. >> - IMO it would be nice to follow the proposed machine-parsable copyright >> format[1]. This is of course optional. >> > Here is what I have so far. Is this correct? > > This package was debianized by Dave Holland <93djh2@eng.cam.ac.uk> > Thu, 5 Dec 1996 13:32:07 +0000. > > It was adopted by Edward Betts <edward@debian.org> > Sun, 20 Feb 2000 11:30:18 +0000 > > It was adopted by Goswin Brederlow > <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de> > Thu, 2 Nov 2000 11:05:21 +0200 > > It was adopted by Debian Games Team > <pkg-games-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org> > Sat, 1 Mar 2008 11:05:21 -0500 There's not really a problem with the above, but I think it isn't that useful either. Such history can be found in the changelog file. You can assume, however, that they all own copyrights on the debian packaging, so their names should be in the list below. > Original source may be found at: http://www.catb.org/~esr/xlife-5.0.tar.gz > Files: * > Copyright: (c) 1989 Jon Bennett <jb7m+@andrew.cmu.edu> I heard "(c)" is legally meaningless. You should use the full word "Copyright" instead. I usually put it on a separate line, especially when there is more than one copyright holder: Copyright: Copyright 1989 Jon Bennet <address> Copyright 1992 Foo Bar <address> You need the indentation to make it part of the Copyright field. After contacting the authors, it seems likely that there will indeed be more than one copyright holder. > License: other > /* --- license quote --- > */ For the same reason, the license should be indented (by one space is enough). I would also remove the C-style comments, but that's a matter of taste. > Files: debian/* > Copyright: Dave Holland <93djh2@eng.cam.ac.uk> > License: ? Here you need at least all packager's names, and years. It would have been nicer if they had claimed the copyright themselves, but in this case you can just use the time that they were maintainer (or the first and last year that they did an upload). You should check what license they wanted to use, though. For the games team, not the team but you own the copyright on those parts, so you should add your own name. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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