Re: [DEP5] License field in the first paragraph ?
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> In the above example, doc/* are not copyright by Mr. Foo. But if if
> Mr. Foo has done work that allows him to assert a compilation copyright,
> that could apply to the whole package, including doc/*. So, Mr. Foo
> could be listed in the Copyright in the header.
> In this case, there is not a license directly associated with the
> compilation copyright. All the individual files are licensed under A or
> B, by their individual authors. So having License in the header doesn't
> make sense.
Yeah, but if there's a compilation copyright, that means there's
compilation intellectual property that can then be released under a
license.
But there are two other main reasons why I want an overall package
license:
* It's common to release GPL'd software that includes some
2-clause-BSD-licensed files, taking advantage of the ability to
relicense under the BSD licensing terms. In this case, the distribution
as a whole is released under the GPL, but those files are still under
the BSD. Without a global License statement, there isn't a good way to
represent this without requiring someone draw that inference from the
licenses of the individual files.
* I suspect that a lot of people won't be interested in documenting the
license and copyright terms of every individual file, and ftpmaster has
in the past allowed this in many cases when the package is huge and all
the files are licensed under compatible terms. In that case, it's nice
to be able to just specify a general package license and make it
explicit that one is not claiming to have a comprehensive listing of all
files with their copyright and license statements.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: