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Re: How specific must Copyright be?



On 2019-06-12 09:08 +0200, Birger Schacht wrote:
> Dear mentors,
> 
> I ITP (#929666) a software that lacks a copyright statement. I asked
> upstream to clarify the copyright in the LICENSE file and upstream now
> plans to use
> > Copyright 2018-2019 github.com/containers authors
> as a copyright statement. This seems a bit vague to me, in my experience
> the copyright statement usually refers to persons or legal entities.
> Would a copyright statement like the one above be acceptable in a
> d/copyright file? Is it even legally valid?

A copyright ownership statement is not a free software licence, and as
someone pointed out, it defaults to 'entirely proprietary, all rights
reserved', which is not suitable for Debian. The vagueness of the
statement is not really a problem (specific statements tend to be
increasingly out of date over time unless someone keeps them updated,
anyway). But the point is that the software needs to have a free
software licence otherwise it's not free software. So they need to
decide if they want expat/apache/GPL, or something else approved by
the OSI (https://opensource.org/licenses) (or something else followed
by a long argument about whether or not it meets the DFSG - this is a
very foolish route to take without a _really_ good reason), and write
it down.

Once they've declared a free licence, Debian is happy. How they choose
to record their authorship copyrights is entirely up to them - just copy it.
 
Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/

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