Re: Fixing old-fsf-address-in-copyright-file

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> > Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> 
> >> So far as I can tell from the GPL 2 and GPL 3, Eduardo is correct
> >> and the address portion is not part of the notices that the GPL
> >> requires be maintained.
> 
> > That's speak of what we are legally required to do by copyright
> > law, which is not the point I'm questioning. What I'm asking about
> > is what should be in ‘debian/copyright’.
> 
> Why would those two things be different?

For the simple reason that copyright law doesn't require us to put
*anything at all* in ‘debian/copyright’. What we put in there is
dictated by Debian policy and other conventions, not copyright law.

> What Policy says is:
> 
>     Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its
>     copyright and distribution license in the file
>     /usr/share/doc/package/copyright. This file must neither be
>     compressed nor be a symbolic link.
> 
>     [...]
> 
>     Packages distributed under the UCB BSD license, the Apache
>     license (version 2.0), the Artistic license, the GNU GPL
>     (version 2 or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), and the
>     GNU FDL (version 1.2) should refer to the corresponding files
>     under /usr/share/common-licenses, rather than quoting them in
>     the copyright file.
> 
> This could definitely be clearer about what should be included in
> the case of the common-licenses, but in the case of the GPL, the
> bits required to comply with section 4 apart from the verbatim copy
> of the license (which is what's handled by common-licenses) seem
> like an obvious, common-sense interpretation:

I don't see why we keep mixing up what Debian policy requires of us
with what copyright law requires of us. The requirements of Debian's
policy for the contents of ‘debian/copyright’ don't stem *only* from
the absolute minimum imposed by copyright law (which is nothing at
all).

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Ben Finney