Re: Copyright License Proposal

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> wrote:

On 11-06-06 at 12:01pm, Dominique Dumont wrote:
> Le Monday 6 June 2011 10:13:25, Jonas Smedegaard a écrit :
> > > - Multiple licenses in a single distribution is not a reality
> > > in CPAN world. At least not a reality worth making a big deal
> > > about in this context.
> >
> > Do you mean to claim that they do not exist or that it is too
> > uncommon to bother for your work?
> >
> > RDF::ACL is a concrete example:
> >
> > META.yml contains this:
> >
> > license: perl
> >
> > I added this (and more) to debian/copyright:
> >
> > Files: *
> > Copyright: 2010-2011, Toby Inkster <tobyink@cpan.org>
> > License: Artistic or GPL-1+
> [snip]
>
> I think there's a confusion in your discussion between copyright and
> licences.
>
> Jonas, in the example you gave, the licence of all files are indeed
> perl like (i.e. Artistic or GPL-1+). But you gave much more details
> about the copyright owner.
>
> Ingy, IFAIK, there's not much details in meta.yml about copyrights.
> Only licenses are specified. If I'm right, could this be fixed in CPAN
> world ?

Good point!

I believe, however, that licensing is worthless if done by anyone but
the copyright holder. So (at least for Debian) copyright holders must be
tracked as well, not only licenses.

I just counted that I have 416 modules (not dists) on CPAN. They all have (or should have) a pod section like this:

=head1 AUTHOR

Ingy döt Net <ingy@ingy.net>

=head1 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2011. Ingy döt Net.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html

That's all I do. This is standard, and typical. Tools turn this into 'license: perl' in META.*

Copyright and license are seen as basically the same thing. Whatever I decide to put into my debian/copyright files, it will be the same (or some common permutation) for all of them, no?

If we can detect that a module has nothing more than that, then we can fully automate for those modules, no?

- Jonas

--
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136 Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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