Revising Policy 12.5 (Copyright information)
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> Le vendredi 20 mars 2009 à 10:39 -0500, Manoj Srivastava a écrit :
>> I don't care for copyright notices, really. I care for license
>> statements; and I take the upstream on trust that the license attached
>> to the work is valid (since it is hard to determine every copyright
>> holder -- people who have contributed more than, say, 10 lines of
>> code, unless we trust the upstream to mention them).
>
> That is clearly the reasonable line to follow. However it has not been
> the line of FTP masters for at least a few months now.
Policy doesn't provide much guidance here. Currently, you could read
Policy as saying that you have to reproduce all of the copyright notices
from the source (or read it several other ways; it's not very specific).
The requirements in the current REJECT FAQ are not in Policy and should be
if that's what we're enforcing.
Maybe the best resolution to this is to have a broader discussion that
leads to a rewording of Policy 12.5 that makes the requirements explicit,
with ftp-master buy-in on what the requirements are? Then we can all be
on the same page and everyone will know what the requirements really are,
whereas right now there's a lot of grey area. (For example, up until I
started experimenting with the new copyright file format, I never
documented the license or copyright information for any of the
Autotools-generated files, and I never heard a peep of concern about
that.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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