On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Ben Finney
<ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
Aliaksei Sheshka <
sheshkaoss@gmail.com> writes:
> 1) should a package 'inherit' license from the original COPYING file if
> not stated otherwise ?
If you are asking whether the mere presence of a ‘COPYING’ file, but no
explicit license grant, applies to files in the package: the answer is
no, the mere presence of a license text does not imply any grant of
license.
The grant needs to be explicit, written, specifying exactly what work is
being licensed, in a statement from the copyright holder. Ideally of the
form:
This is <NAME OF WORK>, consisting of <SPECIFIC FILES>. You may <DO
THESE SPECIFIC THINGS> with this work under the terms <FULL LICENSE
TERMS OR UNAMBIGUOUS REFERENCE TO FULL LICENSE TERMS>.
Does that count:
"Several parties hold copyright to various parts of IRRToolSet. One or more
of the following licenses may apply to the code contained within this
distribution." , or too unclear ?
> 2) Which license do have auto generated files, like 'configure',
> 'Makefile', *am', etc ?
If there is no human creativity in the generation of the files, then my
understanding of international copyright law is that such files are not
subject to copyright and hence they are merely an automatic non-creative
transformation from the source form of the work; they would be under
whatever license the source document is under.
You should consult your lawyer though. (You can also consult the
‘debian-legal’ forum, who may also advise you to consult your lawyer.)
> 3) What to do if a file have authors, licence, but a copyright year ?
I don't know how to understand that sentence; I guess you men “but …
does not have a copyright year”.
If so, you need to gather that information yourself; contacting the
copyright holders directly to answer your questions would be one way.
Policy is there not complain but to obey, I know.
I chose couple of random packets, most likely I don't understand something
If consider file
I can't understand what is copyright date is.
Don't get me wrong, Idea of a machine-readable copyright file is a good thing.
Butt I picked couple of random packets, and none of them have that new format.
I don know any real life proper multi-license new format Debian package to use as a reference,
which makes packaging for beginner even harder. I'm asking to check file above in order
to understand what is missing and ask proper questions to upstream.