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Re: Bug#47438: Copyright Information (Debian Policy Manual)



Steve:

Hmm. As I said I'm not a lawyer, and you raise some valid points :-)

Could we perhaps at least update the copyright years? I'm not sure if
that really makes sense, though, because I don't think Ian Jackson has
been actively working on the Policy for awhile.

I suppose copyright of the Policy Manual isn't a huge issue. It just
seems strange to me that for an operating system that keeps its
copyright so rigorously tracked, we are a bit lacking in a document as
important as the Policy.

I, however, have nothing really all that useful to propose, since I'm
not a lawyer. Perhaps we can speak to debian-legal about this sort of
thing. I'm glad to see a bit of discussion around this happening,
maybe it's a minor TODO we can think about.

Cheers,

Jonathan

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Steve Langasek<vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 01:57:04PM -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote:
>> Even if it's not enforceable, I think something with a more recent
>> date is better than nothing. So I'm happy with adding a copyright line
>> for "Debian Policy List Contributors" or something.
>
> That's worse than nothing.  There is no entity named "Debian Policy List
> Contributors" that holds any copyright on this document, and we should not
> include patently false copyright notices.
>
>> Maybe it should be part of the Teams/Policy "constitution" that anyone
>> contributing to the Debian Policy Manual signs off copyright to the
>> SPI Inc.
>
> I have no objection to assigning the copyright for any of my own
> contributions to the policy manual, but SPI doesn't have a framework in
> place for doing copyright assignment today (and even with the FSF, who have
> quite a bit of experience with this, the copyright assignment process is
> somewhat onerous).
>
> In practice, the only reason we need to care about getting a comprehensive
> list of copyright holders is if we want to relicense the document, and that
> requires not only a list of the copyright holders but also a consensus to
> relicense.  So this is really a minor issue.
>
> --
> Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
> Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
> Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
> slangasek@ubuntu.com                                     vorlon@debian.org
>
>
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