Re: Sponsorship requirements and copyright files
On Sun, Mar 22 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
>
>> We also need clarity on why debian/copyright should have a higher level
>> of scrutiny than the upstream itself. Debian does not hold copyright on
>> most upstream source packages, why do we second-guess upstream teams?
>
> It's worth noting here that most upstreams distribute only source, and
> hence rely on the fact that the source carries the licenes and the
> copyright statement and they don't have to do anything special with it.
> When we compile that software and distribute only the binaries as a
> separate package, we've stripped off, say, a BSD license statement and its
> corresponding copyright statement from where upstream put it, and we do,
> under the license, have to preserve that somewhere in our derived work,
> including the corresponding copyright notice. If upstream has a bunch of
> files under various varients of the BSD license, we are required by those
> licenses to preserve all of those notices in the binary package.
>
> This much is a very valid point which I was vaguely aware of but hadn't
> really thought about before this thread.
,----
| 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
| notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
| documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
`----
Do we ever distribute just the binary on our archives? That
would be illegal, yes. But, if in the *other materials* we distribute
is the source tar ball, we a re all OK.
I think we have source areas of the archive, we have source CD
iso's, we provide ways to get said "other materials" via apt-get
source, and so we are all covered. There is not real reason to add all
that into debian/copyright just to cater to the BSD license excerpted
above.
manoj
--
It is impossible to defend perfectly against the attack of those who
want to die.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
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