Re: debian/copyright file
On Fri, 2007-12-28 at 14:56 +0000, Robin Cornelius wrote:
> My main questions are :-
>
> 1) is it necessary to repeat the license text every time, for example :-
>
> Files: libopenjpeg/j2k.c
> libopenjpeg/j2k.h
> libopenjpeg/openjpeg.h
> Copyright: © 2002-2007, Communications and Remote Sensing Laboratory,
> Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium
> © 2002-2007, Professor Benoit Macq
> © 2001-2003, David Janssens
> © 2002-2003, Yannick Verschueren
> © 2003-2007, Francois-Olivier Devaux and Antonin Descampe
> © 2005, Herve Drolon, FreeImage Team
> © 2006-2007, Parvatha Elangovan
> License: BSD-2
> Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without .....
> ...... Full Text ......
>
> Would it be allowable to just state "BSD-2" for each of the cases then
> define the full text at one point in the file?
>
In free text format, mentioning "see above" is OK. The structured
format should allow mentioning large parts only once.
>
>
> There are a couple of files that do NOT have copyright, these were
> created by a US government contractor and therefor :-
>
> Copyright: It is the policy of NLM (U.S. National Library of Medicine)
> (and U.S. government) to not assert copyright.
> License: other
> A non-exclusive copy of this code has been contributed to the Open JPEG
> project.
> Except for copyright, inclusion of the code within Open JPEG for
> distribution and use
> can be bound by the Open JPEG open-source license and disclaimer,
> expressed elsewhere.
>
> Is this a problem at all, not having asserted copyright?
>
It is not OK to mention in debian/copyright that the software "can be
bound" by a license "expressed elsewhere".
>
> Finally many files have the same set of authors and copyright years, but
> then there is a file with an extra contributor here or there, should
> each of these files be listed separately with its own list of copyright
> holders? To me this seems the *correct* way to do things and each file
> that does not fall under the Files: * catch all list should have its own
> entry in the debian/copyright file. Or can i just add the extra
> contributors to the initial Files: * Copyright: xxx yy zzz
> List even though those extra contributors do not have copyright over all
> the files included in that search, files have same license however.
> (Seems incorrect to me)
> This is much less of a problem if the license text does not need to be
> repeated each time.
>
In free text format it is, in my opinion, OK to mention "the files in
the directories ... are copyrighted by a combination of some of the
following copyright holders: ... and are licensed under the terms
of ...".
>
> Just wanted to check the *correct* way to do do things.
That is obviously very good.
Regards,
Bart Martens
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