Re: DEP-5: Structure for multiple copyright statements

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> writes:

> On su, 2010-08-22 at 08:00 +1000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > Could we take advantage of the natural “©” marker to indicate each
> > copyright statement?
>
> That's an interesting idea, but would people in general find it easy or
> difficult to write that character? (I'd have to copy-paste it, for
> instance, since my keymap does not seem to have a binding for it.)

In Vim or Emacs or SCIM or IBus, use the RFC 1345 digraph “C” “o”. (For
Vim, use ‘^K C o’. For Emacs, SCIM, and IBus, enable the RFC 1345 input
method, then use ‘& C o’.)

There are likely other ways; e.g. a LaTeX input mode or locale-specific
compose sequences.

> The word "Copyright" or the ASCII-art "(C)" might be substituted.

I'd be fine with having “Copyright” and “©” as equal and interchangeable
in the specification of that field's value. By my understanding, when
copyright statements were necessary, the UCC specification also had them
as equivalent.

The “(C)” sequence never meant “Copyright” legally, and is unnecessarily
ambiguous. There's no need to recognise it, IMO.

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> Ideally, I'd like to just copy and paste upstream's copyright
> statements into debian/copyright and maybe do some compaction, which
> leads me to prefer a free-form field. Do we think that people are
> going to want to parse and extract individual copyright holders for
> some reason?

Tracking provenance of the code is tedious work, and if it's done anyway
I would much prefer that the information be captured in a common,
structured format to reduce the work of future people wanting to do the
same.

I envisage a tool, perhaps an Emacs script, perhaps even Aptitude,
presenting the copyright information summarised automatically, made
possible because the Copyright field is structured to allow that.

> If so, we would need to standardize the format quite a bit, and I'm
> not sure it's worth it.

I hope a simple enough specification for this field can be found that
satisfies those goals. We seem to be quite close to that result.

-- 
 \        “With Lisp or Forth, a master programmer has unlimited power |
  `\     and expressiveness. With Python, even a regular guy can reach |
_o__)                               for the stars.” —Raymond Hettinger |
Ben Finney