On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Christian Kurz wrote:
> On [15/12/03 1:59], Peter Palfrader wrote:
> > | Authors: Donald Duck, Daisy Duck
> > |
> > | Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001 Donald Duck
> > | 2000, 2002 Daisy Duck
> > |
> > | This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
> [...]
> > | License, version 2, can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2.
>
> Your example only covers the situation where you have an license like
> the GPL, that is also available in /usr/share/common-licenses. But I'm
> missing here some information on how to write copyright files if the
> license isn't available in that directory, if the licenses was written
> by the author from a scratch or if the license just says "Public
> domain."
Copy the copyright statement and license information to your copyright
file in verbatim.
> > Also read Andrew Suffield's mail on what you should do when writing a
> > copyright file:
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200312/msg00194.html
>
> Which also doesn't help anybody in the situations that I described
> above. If you really want to be helpful and have people check and verify
> the copyrigh file in their packages, then please provide not only the
> easiest example that is possible (GPL), but also explain other
> situations or places where people can ask for help.
The debian-legal list certainly is willing to help. Hence the
mail-followup-to header was set to this list. Andrew's mail did
describe it:
| You need to find the bit which says "This program is distributable
| under (license X|the following license:)".
[..]
| Copy that statement _verbatim_ into the copyright file.
I suggest you reread it again.
> > Please do check that your packages' copyright files are ok, a large
> > percentage is not.
>
> And how much work would it have been for you, having read several
> copyright files as it seems, to at least name the ones you found that
> aren't correct?
Because I only checked a hundred or so and over 30 of them were broken.
My favorite example so far is fakeroot, but alsa-utils, autotools-dev,
bash, bison, busybox-static, ccache, dbs, gq - to only name a few - also
have bad copyright files.
Peter
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