Re: Packages Within Packages (How to copyright?)
Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com> writes:
> The other day I was packaging Module::CPANTS::Analyse, a Perl module.
> As part of its tests, it includes a bunch of other distributions in
> gzipped tarball format. However, as these included tarballs are
> actually those of other distributions, their copyright is different.
> Sure, that's fine.
>
> So I have a bunch of copyright statements for each .tar.gz file.
>
> My question becomes: what happens when a file *inside* the tar.gz has
> a different copyright than the rest of the package?
Since the *.tar.gz files aren't included in a binary package, the
practical answer is that it really doesn't matter very much, or at least
only matters to the extent that ftp-master needs your copyright
information to check the archive for non-free files. The *.tar.gz files
include all the relevant licenses, so you don't need to duplicate
information in order to satisfy licenses, only to aid with copyright
checking.
I would just document each *.tar.gz file with the distribution copyright
and license, namely whatever the author indicates covers the
distribution as a whole, and make sure that they didn't mess up and
include something with an incompatible license.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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