Re: DEP-5: Please clarify the meaning of "same licence and share copyright holders"
Le Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 11:06:39AM +0200, Fabian Greffrath a écrit :
>
> If I understand the sentence in question correctly then the proposal
> really requires me to create all three stanzas... that's insane!
Dear Fabian,
everything has been written earlier in this thread, so this is more a summary
than new informations.
The format for machine-readable debian/copyright (that I call “machine-readable
license summary” in the packages I maintain) does not substitute to the Policy,
the copyright law, nor common sense :)
After noticing that
- The copyright statement is sometimes part of the license itself,
- The license does not always require to reproduce the copyright statement,
- the dh_make template had an enormous influence but is not normative,
we agreed while preparing the DEP that the Copyright field would better be
optional and free-form.
The Debian Policy (§12.5) demands that each packages is accompanied by a file,
debian/copyright in source packages and /usr/share/doc/package/copyright in
binary packages, that contains a verbatim copy of its copyright and
distribution license, nevertheless it is my impression that Russ would be open
on softening the terms of this paragraph if it creates misunderstandings, and
that the admins of our archive reject packages for missing licenses, but not
for missing copyright.
So to answer more directly to your question, the format lets you do what you
prefer: keep all information, group all copyright statements in one stanza, or
decide to not list the copyright holders. I usually pick my choice according to
the size of the package, or to reflect that some parts of the source are copied
from an independant project.
However, as Russ pointed out, some licenses contain statements such as “The
above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software”. If there is no such a
statement in other files of a binary packages then debian/copyright seems like
the right place to hold them. In the case of big projects, Upstream themselves
never went through the hassle of doing this collection work. My personal
opinion is that we should not put to ourselves limits that Upstream could not
stand, but the decision is in the hands of the Policy delegates and the archive
administrators.
Similarly, some licenses contain unfactorisable statemnts such as “Neither the
name of Upstream nor the name of his university can be used to…”. This causes a
problem as above. It was discussed on this list wether the opinion of the SPI
lawyer would be asked, but I do not know if it was done.
Probably the best way to clear any misunderstanding is to improve the examples,
and include a machine-readable debian/copyright file from a large package of
our archive. Sune, Mike, if you would be intersted to give it a try, let me/us
know. For ‘/usr/share/doc/iceweasel/copyright’, the conversion looks
straightforward, and for ‘/usr/share/doc/kdebase/copyright’ it looks more
challenging, unless of course we factorize or discard some copyright statements
as described above.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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