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Re: Distributing Debian derivative



On Mon Mar 22 14:24, David Given wrote:
> > Absent any modifications, all of Debian (that is, the ‘main’ archive
> > section) is free to redistribute verbatim in any form. Many other
> > actions are also permitted; see the specific license texts for details.
> 
> I've read that; unfortunately, it just talks about the philosophy of
> Freeness, and doesn't provide anything about the actual mechanics of
> what I need to do.
> 
> Do I, for example, have to manually compile a list of every single
> license for every package in the tarball and make those available
> individually on my website, or is there a simpler way, like a specific
> piece of legal boilerplate approved by debian-legal pointing at the
> licenses elsewhere? Is there any overall cover text I need to include?
> Or do the copies of the licenses in the tarball itself suffice, meaning
> I don't need to provide any additional information, and can just plonk
> the tarball distribution on Sourceforge and be done with it?

disclaimer: IANAL etc and this is just ottomh,

but the most prescriptive licence you'll have to deal with is the GPL, which
requires you to either make the source available with the binary or to honour
requests for the source for up to 3 years. 

As far as licence files are concerned, if you are shipping a Debian image then
this will (unless you have stripped them) include
/usr/share/doc/$package/copyright with all the licence statements in. This
should be sufficient. If you are stripping them, then you'll probably have to
make other arrangements.

I'd have thought that if you build a source tarball with the sources for all
the packages in your image and don't strip /usr/share/doc from the image, then
you will probably be fine for anything in main.

Others can feel free to correct me though.

Matt

-- 
www.matthew.ath.cx
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