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 The vagueness of the statement is not really a problem (specific statements tend to be increasingly out of date over time unless someone keeps them updated, anyway).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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