On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 09:57:15AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> >> License: public-domain
> >> <insert here the exact wording from upstream explaining why the work is
> >> in the public domain>
>
> >> You do need some sort of statement about why the work is in the public
> >> domain, since that's a rather unusual status and requires some
> >> justification (such as that it's a US government work).
>
> > or just not copyrightable at all in many jurisdictions (factual data etc.) ;-)
>
> Yes, but be careful with that. It can't just be "many" jurisdictions; it
> has to be all the ones that Debian has to legally care about.
Furthermore, the goal of DEP5 is not to establish documents that
represent reality in some legally valid way. It is rather to enable us
to automatically parse, and then analyze, license/copyright related
information that we know of. Some motivating examples are spotting ---
or at least narrow down the search for --- license incompatibilities
like SSL + GPL w/o exception, forbidden cases of the GPL compatibility
matrix, etc.
To that end, having a way to mechanically recognize that some code is
(declared as) public domain is useful, no matter how legally imprecise
is to declare something like "License: public-domain".
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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