Bug#466714: bogus advice in copyright-without-copyright-notice
Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> If the author of the work is an individual, then the copyright exists
> some number of years past his lifetime. If the author doesn't write
> "Copyright 2007" in his files, then I can't make that up. Moreover, the
> exact years really don't matter much. Either the copyright exists, and
> then we are presumably granted a suitable license, or it doesn't, in
> which case we can use the work anyway.
This is a fairly rare case and other Debian Developers have in the past
gone back to the upstream author and asked for a copyright notice in this
case. Also, an override may be appropriate here for the case where that
really isn't possible.
Alternately, you can persuade Joerg to clarify what the ftp-master
requirements are. I really want lintian to check based on what he's
accepting or rejecting, and right now the reject FAQ is pretty explicit
that you must list the copyright date and author.
> The other part that is not really clear in the sources you cite is
> author vs. copyright holder. I don't think it can be very successful to
> attempt to squeeze the reality of authorship rights into a uniform
> copyright statement. We need to explain to the user which rights he has
> and how those rights came about, but there is no need to beat that into
> a common form so lintian can parse it.
On this, I guess I just disagree on the cost/benefit tradeoff. What
lintian is asking for has been common practice on debian-mentors and there
were two separate wishlist bugs filed asking for this check. It catches a
lot of broken copyright files like:
Copyright: GPL
or copyright files that list the license with no mention of the copyright
holder when the license requires that the copyright notice be preserved
(all BSD- and MIT-licensed works). The benefit is really quite high, IMO.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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