Re: debian/* license of non-free packages
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 01:46:52PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 05:54:28PM +0000, Bart Martens wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 09:29:07AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > > Actually, all of those cases are equivalent, and in all of those cases the
> > > patch author has the option of what license they want to use.
>
> > > It's conventional (although not entirely legally sound) in the free
> > > software community to just assume that any patch submitted without any
> > > explicit license statement is licensed under the same terms as the
> > > upstream source.
>
> > I guess you meant : It's conventional (although not entirely legally
> > sound) in the free software community to just assume that the copyright of
> > any patch submitted without any explicit copyright and license statement
> > is transferred (given) to the copyright holders of the upstream software.
>
> This is a far less common convention... precisely because it's far less
> legally sound. You can make a good faith assumption that someone who's
> sending you a patch for inclusion means for it to be under the same license;
> but copyright assignments need to be documented.
It's what happens in practice when I submit a patch upstream and don't say
anything about my copyright. Upstream integrates the patch in the upstream
source code and redistributes the result with upstream copyright and license.
I think that this happens quite a lot.
Regards,
Bart Martens
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