Re: Documenting copyright holders in debian/copyright
On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 09:34:59PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>...
> 1. Most licenses require copyright statements to be included. In the FTP
> team's view, unless a license explicitly states that copyright attributions
> only apply to source distributions, they apply for source and binary, so must
> be documented in debian/copyright for license compliance reasons.
>...
> GPL requires an "appropriate copyright notice" for both source and binary
> forms.
My reading of 7(b) of GPLv3 would be that it is not required.
Have any lawyers or the FSF been consulted on that?
>...
> 3. In a few cases, FTP masters have determined that full copyright
> attribution is both not feasible and, given the nature of the package, that an
> appropriate copyright notice does not need to list all copyright holders and
> allowed packages with an incomplete debian/copyright into the archive. Such a
> package still violates policy, although the FTP masters believe it to be a
> minor violation. Just because such a determination has been made about one
> package, does not mean it should apply to another package. Almost certainly
> the answer to requests for additional exceptions will be no.
If the ftp team believes that distributing GPL code without copyright
attributions in debian/copyright is required for license compliance
reasons, noone except the copyright holders can legally grant an
exception that allows Debian to distribute that code.
If one copyright holder of a package with an existing ftp team exception
package would take legal actions against a Debian mirror, what would be
the official position of Debian regarding the legality of what our
mirror distributes?
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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