Manoj, why are you suggesting to infringe the copyright law?
Hello,
[this mail is cross posted to debian-devel, as I think it is important for
other developers to know what mischief is going on here on debian-policy.
Follow up please to debian-policy. The whole thread can be read in
debian-policy, too]
Manoj wrote:
> And I say we should not have the exception even for copyright
> documents. They should be in the verbatim section, on another CD, but
> in an required package, and with all indications that they are an
> integral part of Debian.
So, what is Manoj suggesting here?
Essentially, his suggestion means that we should remove the content of
/usr/doc/copyright/* and every single /usr/doc/*/copyright file in the
distribution and put it "elsewhere", to a location outside the main
section.
This is breaking the copyright law and I disagree strongly.
The copyright documents are NOT TO BE REMOVED from the packages. Even the
current situation is suboptimal, as certain packages (those that are covered
under the GPL, LGPL, BSD and Artistic license) don't have the copyright
document with them, but only a notice that they are copyrighted under the
GPL (LGPL, BSD, Artistic) and a reference to the file below
/usr/doc/copyright/. I think Richards idea to have common files only installed
once when the md5sums matches is a good solution to this problem.
The current situation is not optimal, but it is not necessarily breaking the
law (as base-files is granted to be installed on every Debian system and is
flagged essential and is an integral part of the Debian *main* distribution).
However, it has to be resolved. I already posted another mail to discuss
this.
Manojs suggestion ("on another CD") is an infringement of copyright law.
Background:
Copyright documents are not to be removed from a work, and are the only
thing that grants us redistribution. For practical reasons, we currently
ship common copyright documents in /usr/doc/copyright/* and make a
reference. Only four copyrights are affected, other licenses are spelled out
verbatim in the <package>/copyright file.
Most copyright licenses (all I know of) are *not* modificable. Manoj things
that this is not in accordance with the general freeness of the Debian main
distribution, and therefore wants to have the licenses removed from the main
distribution. This ignores the core difference between copyright documents
and other works, as licenses *apply* to other works and are the only thing
that grants us redistribution. Not shipping the license means not shipping
at all.
Thank you,
Marcus
--
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