Dear Legal People,
I am sorry to drag your attention to such a primitive case but to don't
waste too much time in debates on the subject I am not strong in, I
decided to ask for clarification (and may be advice) from the list.
Today I've filed a bugreport http://bugs.debian.org/451647 against
wacom-tools package. Its copyright file imho violates the policy (I
think I can cite it here since it is quite "concise")
,---
| This package was created by Ron Lee <ron@debian.org> on
| Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:06:55 -0800.
|
| Parts of it were downloaded from http://linuxwacom.sf.net
|
| Copyright: GPL
|
| Some files in the linuxwacom distribution are now covered by the LGPL,
| the individual files are marked accordingly.
|
| A copy of the GPL and LGPL can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses
| on Debian systems.
`---
I take debian policy statement
,---
| 12.5 Copyright information
|
| Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright and
| distribution license in
`---
that it requires copyright file to list copyright holder(s) and
corresponding licenses if the software is not in public domain and is
distributed under copyleft license such as GPL or LGPL.
Indeed people usually don't list copyrights and licenses for some build
helpers (usually autogenerated) such as auto* tools. But I thought that
we (DDs and Debian Maintainers) are required to list the copyright
holders relevant to the distributed within package material. Otherwise
copyright file has little sense and can be summarized by two fields in
control file (such as License:, Homepage:)
Unfortunately the maintainer of wacom-tools does not agree on that and
his replies imho become more philosophical than practical.
My questions to the list now:
1. Do we have to list all copyright holders + licenses per each piece of
software distributed within a package? or it is more of "should" than
"must" (which would be in strong disagreement with my previous state of
mind)?
2. Is wacom-tools violating the debian policy?
Thanks in advance
--
Yaroslav Halchenko
Research Assistant, Psychology Department, Rutgers-Newark
Student Ph.D. @ CS Dept. NJIT
Office: (973) 353-5440x263 | FWD: 82823 | Fax: (973) 353-1171
101 Warren Str, Smith Hall, Rm 4-105, Newark NJ 07102
WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik
Attachment:
pgpqisnUQxuiS.pgp
Description: PGP signature