Re: Copyright and License Guidelines

[Jonathan Yu <jawnsy@cpan.org>]

Russ,

Thanks for your candour.

Let me cut to the part that is very relevant to our current work:

> If a distribution told me I had to include complete copyright statements
> for every contribution for them to include my software, I'd point them at
> the law and tell them that there's no reason to go to that effort.  If

I didn't say complete copyright statements for each contribution,
however, you have to realize that in the absence of a Contributor
License Agreement, you legally cannot just take over copyright for
work that people submit (via patches, etc.) This is why it is helpful
to have a CLA, regardless of what you or Damyan think about it
philosophically. I will admit I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding
of the Berne Convention requires this.

Let me digress a little and say: I don't care what copyright license
statement you give me in your package, so long as there is one, and so
long as that covers everything in your package. Legally speaking, if
you take some code from somewhere else and include it in inc/, then
you should be giving copyright/license details for that as well (as an
upstream person) -- this is legally required per the GPL and various
other licenses that require attribution, etc.

Anyway, from a packaging point of view, I need at least *a* copyright
statement from upstream. If you don't give me one, then I have to use
my "best guess", which is not perfect and may land me (or Debian) in
hot water with the legal system.

> overturn such a policy, but I don't believe it actually *is* Debian's
> policy, just the misunderstanding of some well-meaning packagers.)

Does this mean we can just push AnyEvent and related modules through
Debian, with the copyright statement "Marc Lehmann, maybe other
contributors, I don't really know"

Cheers,

Jonathan