Re: Has Copyright summarizing outlived its usefulness?
Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, 13 Dec 2017 at 23:10:51 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> > expecting to find “complete copyright holder information” such
> > that we can be confident it *is* complete, solely in the upstream source
> > is a folly, in my experience.
>
> Given that, on what basis can a user of the package gain value from
> our claim that the complete list of copyright holders is present in
> debian/copyright?
Because that file is typically a record of a specific effort to
*acquire* that information, and to document it for people who are
careful about the provenance and grant of license in the work.
The upstream source typically does not have that property, which is why
I'm saying ‘debian/copyright’ is valuable for that in a way that can't
be had from a typical upstream source work.
> For non-trivial packages it almost certainly isn't, because if the
> upstream maintainers (who gate all contributions) don't know the
> complete list
In my experience the information can be had from the upstream people, in
many cases where it simply isn't recorded reliably or coherently in the
source work.
The distinction I'm drawing is in response to proposals in this thread,
to declare the record in ‘debian/copyright’ to be obsolete. Some
proposals have advocated that we rely on finding that information solely
in the upstream work.
I'm pointing out that's comparatively unreliable, by comparison to the
current – admittedly under-resourced – concerted effort to find and
gather and standardise and maintain that information for the benefit of
people who want to quickly find the freedoms granted and who
specifically grants those freedoms.
> > This effort is rarely undertaken to completion in the general
> > free-software community.
>
> Yes, and rather than seeing that as a source of disappointment with
> the general free software community and demanding that our volunteers
> spend heroic amounts of effort on doing it ourselves, perhaps we
> should consider why it's rarely done, and spend our volunteers' time
> more wisely?
I agree that the burden falls unfairly on Debian Project volunteers. I
prefer to have our volunteers push that responsibility upstream more
often, making it a norm beyond our project and into the broader
community, to expect that the information can be found. And gently,
diplomatically, promoting the importance to any potential free software
recipient of knowing the provenance of a work's copyright status and
provenance.
> Linux distributions exist, they don't attempt to list every copyright
> holder on the Linux kernel, and in practice this is fine, which
> suggests that this is an ocean we're trying to boil as a weird Debian
> thing rather than because we actually need to. It's fine to have weird
> Debian things that we do because we're Debian rather than because we
> absolutely need to do them - but when we do, we should be clear about
> why, so that we can stop enforcing them if the cost (mostly in
> maintainer time and motivation, our most valuable commodities) exceeds
> the benefit.
I agree with the need to be clear about why. I hope this and other
expressions in this thread have helped make it clearer.
As you describe, the Debian Project has a long history in the free
software community of leading by persistent example, on a basis of
well-reasoned principle and informed by fact. I think this can continue.
--
\ “If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it |
`\ works, we've already failed.” —Peter Lee, Disney corporation, |
_o__) 2005 |
Ben Finney
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