On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:37:54AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Copyright notices are strictly optional in countries that are signatories > to Berne. If the copyright holder doesn't put one on, we're under no > obligation to invent one. We're under no *legal* obligation to invent one, true, but having documentation of the code's provenance is useful if there are questions of legitimacy or if there's ever a concern about license ambiguities or relicensing. For Debian packaging we probably aren't ever going to run into a situation where we have to worry about it, and for upstream code I think it's fine to rely on upstream themselves to track this - but it does mean we ought to at least have documentation of the *primary* upstream copyright holders, even if they haven't bothered to include copyright notices upstream. So I'm not comfortable with a principle of only doing the bare minimum required by law. But none of this should stand in the way of dropping the requirement of documenting the "original packagers" of the software, who may not (or no longer) have any copyright interest in the current package. -- 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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