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Re: licensing question for "nom.tam.fits"



On Sat, 1 Dec 2012 10:47:47 +0900 Charles Plessy wrote:

> Le Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 11:26:29PM +0100, Francesco Poli a écrit :
> > 
> > P.P.S.: I am not sure what you should write in the Copyright field for
> > the upstream files, but "(c) 1996-2012 by Thomas A. McGlynn" does not
> > look right, as long as the upstream work is really in the public domain
> > (which, as you probably know, means that the work is *not* subject to
> > copyright!)...
> > The machine-readable debian/copyright file format specification v1.0
> > (http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/)
> > is not too clear on this point, unfortunately...
> > Maybe you should ask on the debian-policy mailing list and suggest that
> > this topic should be clarified in the specification.
> 
> Hi Francesco,

Hi Charles!

> 
> the 1.0 specification mentions for the Copyright field:
> 
>   If a work has no copyright holder (i.e., it is in the public domain), that
>   information should be recorded here.

Yes, I had read that, but it didn't seem too clear to me.

Since one of the "standard short names" for the License field is
"public-domain", I thought that specifying

  Copyright: public-domain
  License: public-domain
   [explanation of why the files are in the public domain...]

was awkward and redundant.

Hence, I wondered what should be put in the Copyright field when the
License field says "public-domain"...

> 
> Inspecting Debian copyright files from
> svn://anonscm.debian.org/collab-qa/packages-metadata/ I see that many chose
> contents such as "none", "nobody", "public-domain", "not relevant", etc, which
> I think are good enough, given that the content of the Copyright field is
> free-form.

OK, so maybe

  Copyright: none
  License: public-domain
   [explanation of why the files are in the public domain...]

is the way to go.

I just wish that the 1.0 specification were more explicit on this
point...

> 
> Have a nice week-end,

The same to you, and thanks for your kind reply.


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