Boyuan Yang <073plan@gmail.com> writes:
> Howerver, what we, the distribution maintainers, really care is that
> these files do not conflict with our guideline aka DFSG. In this
> situation it is the license that matters, not copyright holders. For
> large software like linux kernel or libboost, we don't really need to
> take hours trying to make a comprehensive author list in d/copyright
> file. Something like "2010-2017 (C) The Boost Maintainers" should be
> acceptable. Of course if the file is under a different license
> (different from th license of whole project) or some authors had their
> names written inside source code *explicitly*(e.g., in the comment), it
> must be listed out in a separate paragraph of d/copyright.
One caveat: be careful of licenses that include clauses like:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
or:
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its
documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that
both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in
supporting documentation
or:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
In chose cases, the list of copyright holders may well be part of the
"above copyright notice" and hence must be included in the binary package
somewhere. (Also note that this means the copyright notice provided by
upstream, even if it's wrong, which is an interesting wrinkle.)
Admittedly, it's highly unlikely anyone would pursue legal action over
this, but still, our goal around licenses has generally been to fully
comply with the license, even the bits people probably don't care about.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>