Re: Is Debian itself *really* freely redistributable?

[Mike Coleman <coleman@chez-gnu.cstp.umkc.edu>]

   Date: Sun, 2 Jun 96 13:23 PDT
   From: bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)

   From: Mike Coleman <coleman@chez-gnu.cstp.umkc.edu>
   > It seems to me, though, that the Debian packages themselves (e.g., *.deb)
   > files are derivatives that the package maintainers hold a (so far implicit)
   > copyright on.

   We publish a copyright statement with each Debian package. In each package,
   we have honored the copyright of the original author and we have placed
   the entire package under that copyright, including the Debian modifications.

I'm assuming that you're talking about /usr/doc/copyright here.  I'm not a
lawyer, but for most of the packages, it doesn't look like anything at all is
being said about the copyright on Debian modifications.

To take an example, the copyright for electric-fence, which you wrote,
says nothing about the copyright Siggy, the current package maintainer, holds
on his modifications.

This does seem like fine hairsplitting; if no one else sees this as a problem,
I'll not worry about it either.

--Mike