Re: DEP-5: Please clarify the meaning of "same licence and share copyright holders"
Noah Slater <nslater@tumbolia.org> writes:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 03:57:46PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Because we have to comply with licenses that say that we need to
>> reproduce the copyright notice.
> Don't we satisfy that requirement simply by packaging the source
> files?
I don't see how. Consider another common license pattern:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
"Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included
in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
How does packaging the source files in a separate source package satisfy
that requirement? We'd still be distributing a "substantial portion" of
the Software without including a copyright notice with that portion.
That we're complying with the license in a different portion doesn't
seem particularly helpful.
In practice, I suspect we could get away with it, particularly since we
keep source and binary packages fairly tightly coupled due to GPL
requirements. But I don't think doing so would be clearly correct.
> I'm guessing it has something to do with binary packages, but I just
> want to make sure.
Yes.
> Of particular interest is the fact that most times when we are
> required to reproduce the copyright statement, we are required to do
> so verbatim; and hence this does not satisfy that.
I don't think that's anywhere near as obvious of a statement as it might
appear. If the original said "Copyright 1994 Foo Bar" and we instead
said "Copyright 1992-1996 Foo Bar", is that reproducing the copyright
notice? Personally, and not being a lawyer, I'd say the answer is
obviously yes. There is a copyright notice and it contains all of the
information in the original copyright notice. It also contains some
additional information, but I don't think that's particularly relevant.
The meaning is fully preserved in that statement.
The law is not a computer program; it doesn't care about the specific
format and representation of a notice except in some very limited
circumstances.
I'm happy to defer to the opinion of a copyright lawyer, however.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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