Re: Bug#210779: libtunepimp1: give me the license

[Dylan Thurston <dpt@math.harvard.edu>]

On 2003-09-15, John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> wrote:
> Don Armstrong writes:
>> Now, if the Author or Copyright holder asks us nicely to include their
>> license literally, we might as well accomodate them.  But by default, I
>> see no reason to do any differently than we are already doing.
>
> You can do what you want.  However, every one of my GPL licensed packages
> contains GPL licensed work of which I am author and I want my license to
> accompany it.
>
>> The upstream's COPYING file (or COPYRIGHT, AUTHORS, etc.) should already
>> be included in debian/copyright, unless it's some wierd usage of that
>> file.
>
> "COPYING" is the name commonly applied by authors to the file containing
> the GPL.  It belongs in usr/share/doc/<package>.  It most certainly does
> not belong in debian/copyright.
>
> If you feel strongly about the wasted bytes write a patch for dpkg to
> identify copies of the GPL and replace them with symlinks.

I'd just like to not that Richard Stallman, in a recent post to
debian-legal, had the same interpretation as that above of Debian's
legal obligations (namely, COPYING must be included with the package,
but it may be removed later).  How hard would such a patch to dpkg be?

Peace,
	Dylan Thurston