Re: How (not) to write copyright files - take two
Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org> writes:
> I am packaging a program for debian, and wrote a manpage and two patches
> for making it compile with libwxwindows. I am not very interested in
> being the author list: I would be a bit ashamed that my name would
> appear more frequently that the author's for a work which is not mine.
> Also, I feel a bit lazy and do not want the burden of changing the
> copyright file whenever one of my modifications is accepted or
> obsoleted.
> Is it OK if I release the patches and the manpages in the public domain,
> and I do not mention the manpage and the patches in the copyright file?
I recommend always adding an additional section to debian/copyright giving
an explicit statement about the copyright of the packaging work. It's
just good copyright "hygiene," since otherwise people have to make guesses
and assumptions that may not be correct.
Here's an example from one of my packages:
Debianized by Robert S. Edmonds <stu@novare.net> 1998-03-21
Adopted by Chad C. Walstrom <chewie@debian.org> 2001-02-06
Adopted by Martin O. Hicks <mort@bork.org> 2003-11-02
Adopted by Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> 2005-04-18
It was downloaded from:
<http://www.radix.net/~cknudsen/gtimer/>
although the current home page appears to be:
<http://www.k5n.us/gtimer.php>
Upstream author:
Craig Knudsen <cknudsen@cknudsen.com>
Debian packaging copyright:
Changes by Robert S. Edmonds, Chad C. Walstrom, and Martin O. Hicks
did not have explicit copyright statements. See the Debian changelog
for the dates of changes. Presumably all their changes may be
redistributed under the same terms as GTimer itself.
Changes by Russ Allbery are copyright 2005, 2006 Russ Allbery and may
be redistributed and/or modified 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.
Copyright:
(C) 1999 Craig Knudsen, cknudsen@cknudsen.com
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
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301,
USA.
The full text of the GNU General Public License is available on Debian
systems in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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