Re: How specific must Copyright be?
Hi,
On 6/12/19 3:01 PM, Wookey wrote:
> 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 increasingly out of date over time unless someone keeps them updated,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.
Thanks, I should have been more clear: the LICENSE file is an Apache-2.0
license and the above mentioned copyright statement is part of the
LICENSE file. My question was only about the validity of the Copyright
statement ;)
> 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.
Okey, I'll do that!
cheers,
Birger
>
> Wookey
>
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