Manoj Srivastava wrote: > 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. And even if it was, there are binary packages whose /usr/share/doc/$pkg is a symlink, so they have no copyright. Which is another reason why we don't it, at least in the general case. Emilio
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