Re: Help about license
"Nelson A. de Oliveira" <n3150nao@bol.com.br> schrieb:
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> Hi mentors
>
> I need one help.
> When there is a program that only says "(c) GNU Copyleft", what do I put
> on debian/copyright file, at section "License:"?
> GNU Copyleft could be considered GNU GPL?
In Copyright law, you should rarely "consider something as meaning
...". This statement ist just a no-license. You should contact
upstream and kindly ask them to change this to a proper copyright
statement. Note that a license and a copyright are two different
things. In the end it will have to look like this:
,----
| Copyright: 2004, 2005 J. Random Developer
| 2004 Friend Ly. Contributor
|
| This program is free software. You can distribute and/or modify it under
| the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
| Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
| option) any later version.
`----
That is, there must be a statement about which persons own the
copyright, and a separate statement about the distribution conditions.
After this there should be either a copy of the GPL, or a reference
where it can be found. On Debian, it often looks as what I paste below,
but for upstream this is obviously not possible. Also note that it is
*not* sufficient to put a copy of the GPL in the tarball. Instead,
there *must* be a statement that the software is intended to be covered
by that license!
This is an example how a copyright file could look like:
**************************************
This package was debianized by Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch> on
Wed, 19 Feb 2003 13:41:38 +0100, using work from the former maintainers.
It was downloaded from http://netenv.sourceforge.net/.
Upstream Author: Gerd Bavendiek <bav@epost.de>
Copyright:
netenv and associated files are copyrighted by Gerd Bavendiek
<bav@epost.de>, 1998-2003
The math utility included in the source (but not used and packaged in
Debian) is copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 Bruce Perens.
Modifications of netenv package for Debian GNU/Linux are copyrighted
1998 Brian Mays, 1998 Michael Meskes, 2001 Robert van der Meulen, 2003
Frank Küster.
All parts of this program are free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License,
version 2, with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution in file
/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
USA
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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