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Re: A proposal for improving transparency of the FTP NEW process



Am Freitag, den 02.03.2018, 17:49 +0100 schrieb Philip Hands:
> Gert Wollny <gw.fossdev@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Am Freitag, den 02.03.2018, 14:01 +0100 schrieb Iustin Pop:
> > > 
> > > How do you (we) know the package indeed is DFSG-compliant, if
> > > there
> > > is  no license information? If upstream cannot bother to provide
> > > headers, how do we know the code is indeed licenced under the
> > > claimed
> > > licence? 
> > > Etc.
> > > Note: I haven't looked at the package. Maybe I misunderstand the
> > > situation…
> > 
> > The information is all there big parts of it just can't be
> > automatically extracted (mostly the copyright information),
> 
> Would you be so kind as to cite some examples of copyright
> information that is there but not automatically extractable, just so
> that we can get an idea of what you have in mind?

Sspecifically in vtk7 there are two main issues, one is that in nearly
all files the main copyright header is 

  Copyright (c) Ken Martin, Will Schroeder, Bill Lorensen
  All rights reserved.
  See Copyright.txt or http://www.kitware.com/Copyright.htm for 
  details.

     This software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
     the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A ARTICULAR
     PURPOSE.  See the above copyright notice for more information.

Which means licensecheck will report an unknown license, and one has to
check what is actually written in these files. Copyright.txt is then
simply a BSD-3 clause license, but obviously one has to check.

The second issue is that there are often two or more distinct copyright
notices in different blocks with different statements, think variations
of: 
  
 Copyright 2008 Sandia Corporation.
 Under the terms of Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000 with Sandia Corporation,
 the U.S. Government retains certain rights in this software.

 Copyright (c) Ken Martin, Will Schroeder, Bill Lorensen
 All rights reserved.
 See Copyright.txt or http://www.kitware.com/Copyright.htm for details.

Another licenses that is not recognized is 

 Copyright 2008 Sandia Corporation.
 Under the terms of Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000, there is a non-
 exclusive license for use of this work by or on behalf of the
 U.S. Government. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, 
 with or without modification, are permitted provided that this Notice
 and any statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies.

Cheers, 
Gert


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