Re: Has Copyright summarizing outlived its usefulness?
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? For non-trivial packages it almost certainly isn't,
because if the upstream maintainers (who gate all contributions) don't
know the complete list, then the Debian maintainer (who usually doesn't)
certainly isn't in a position to know the complete list either.
> 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'm concerned that we are holding Debian to a higher standard than is
either achievable or useful; and a standard that, if applied consistently,
would result in us not having anyone willing to maintain large packages
like src:linux for any significant period of time, or review those
packages' d/copyright when that's needed.
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 have no objection to volunteers who enjoy chasing copyright details
spending their time on it and providing patches, but unless its absence
is literally causing us to be at significant legal risk, I don't think
it's proportionate to be using the biggest stick we have for coercing
volunteers into doing particular work instead of what they enjoy doing:
"if you don't do this, we'll exclude your contributions from Debian".
smcv
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