Re: snippets

[David Schleef <ds@schleef.org>]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 09:57:13PM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote:
> Let me see if I have this straight.
> 
> Are you actually claiming that a particular paragraph of text in a
> removable "README" file would be a "violation of the social contract",
> while that EXACT SAME PARAGRAPH in a "COPYING" file would not be?

I think you're grasping for some kind of point here.

Upstream packagers tend to put license information in random
locations, including a files called README, COPYING, LICENSE, etc.
It's up to the maintainer to figure out what the license text
is, and put it in /usr/share/${package}/copyright, potentially
consulting with debian-legal and the upstream maintainer.  So no,
the particular file that this text is in does not matter.

If a package maintainer finds the poem "A dirge to my flattened
cat" in a file called LICENSE in an upstream tarball, I think
this would fall under the "consult upstream maintainer" category,
since licenses are not generally written as poetry.



dave...