Re: Goals of debian/copyright
Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>> I wish that you'd not make this argument, since it strikes me as a non
>> sequitur and I keep stumbling over it. Just because the Debian
>> developer has done something does not place upon them an obligation to
>> document that work for other people unless there's some compelling
>> reason why we should *also* require the documentation.
> The compelling reason is this: knowing one's rights is an essential
> part of freedom.
So then, to answer Don's original question, I think the use case is "know
the license of the package in more detail than what is guaranteed by the
DFSG." Which is basically what you said.
I agree with that use case, particularly if we're going to have packages
covered by the Affero General Public License in the archive where users
of the binary package need to be aware of the licensing terms. (This is,
in general, true of the GPL anyway, since if for instance you redistribute
the binaries you may have to provide access to the source. But it's
particularly obvious in the case of the AGPL.)
I just don't like the argument that we should provide debian/copyright
information because the maintainer has to check it all anyway. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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