Re: Bug#47438: Copyright Information (Debian Policy Manual)
Hm. Everyone has raised valid points here, and I understand that in
practice it's difficult to sort this out due to missing history.
I'm satisfied with the wording that Russ proposed to help clarify
things regarding the copyright year, in lieu of a full author list.
(In hindsight it's always nicer to track these things as they're
happening rather than trying to do historical digging to find it.)
Thanks everyone, I consider the problem resolved (pending any serious
legal action, anyway). I doubt that something like debian-policy will
ever need a lawyer, but I suppose it never hurts to be prepared.
Thanks everyone. I look forward to seeing the new wording appear soon.
Cheers,
Jonathan
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 12:30 AM, Manoj Srivastava<srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 29 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
>
>> Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Does the Debian Policy Manual's copyright information need to be
>>> updated?
>>>
>>> Currently it says:
>>> Copyright Notice
>>>
>>> Copyright © 1996,1997,1998 Ian Jackson and Christian Schwarz.
>>>
>>> But clearly the new contributors should have a copyright line as
>>> well, indicating their contributions in the meantime?
>>
>> The problem there is basically that we don't know who to list. I
>> suppose we could go back to the beginning of Manoj's arch history and
>> then troll the changelog for more people to list, but that has a lot of
>> limitations. Also, we'd be listing dozens of people if we were
>> comprehensive, although I suppose we could move that to an appendix.
>>
>> See http://bugs.debian.org/47438 for lots of discussion of this.
>
> I am afraid looking at my arch history will not be enough, since
> I often did not mention all the people involved in crafting wording for
> policy rule; so we really have no idea who all might be copyright
> owners in policy.
>
> I also do not see this as a problem, since we are unlikely to
> try to ever change the copyright (even more unlikely that we can't
> really).
>
> I would much rather work on the docbook rewrite; I have a draft
> proposal lying around here, with an example, which I need to finish up
> and submit to the mailing list. However, I am finding job hunting
> taking up inordinate amounts of time :-(
>
> manoj
> --
> Bachelors' wives and old maids' children are always perfect. Nicolas
> Chamfort
> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
> 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
>
>
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