Re: Has Copyright summarizing outlived its usefulness?
On Thu, 07 Dec 2017 at 13:33:12 +0800, Boyuan Yang wrote:
> 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.
This is (thankfully) not entirely true - if it was, d/copyright files
would be even longer and less useful.
If the license is different, obviously you're right that it needs to be
a separate paragraph.
If the license grant is non-trivially different, again you're right that
it needs to be a separate paragraph. (For license grants for the same
license with trivial wording differences, the letter of the rules seems
to be that they all need to be pasted in; but that would be completely
impractical, and the ftp team were willing to accept src:openjk without
me having done that, so apparently what I did there is considered OK.)
If the copyright holders and years (as mentioned in the source code or
discovered by other means) are the only difference within an equivalence
class of files, then contrary to what you said, it is specifically
allowed to combine copyright holders and years into one paragraph
of the machine-readable copyright format, or do the equivalent in
non-machine-readable copyright files. Please see the d/copyright for
src:adwaita-icon-theme, which is already inconveniently large, and
consider how long it would have been if I had used a separate paragraph
for each .po file that has a different set of potential copyright holders.
I say "potential copyright holders" because I am not a copyright lawyer
and cannot give an informed opinion on whether all those translators have
contributed something copyrightable. The conservative assumption is that
they all did, because listing too many possible copyright holders is safer
than listing too few.
smcv
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