Re: GR proposal: Do not require listing of copyright holders
Mike O'Connor <stew@debian.org> writes:
> And then, of course, there are the other dozens of licenses. Some of
> them (such as the BSD license in /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD) very
> clearly require us to list copyright holders somewhere in the binary
> packages. Some don't have this requirement in the license. Some are
> less clear.
The BSD license does not require that we list all copyright holders
somewhere in the binary packages. It requires that we reproduce a *very
specific* copyright notice in all binary packages, namely the one stated
directly above the license terms. This is quite different if there are
other files that don't reproduce the license and only have a copyright
attached and a note saying they're released under the general terms of
the package (or don't say anything but it's known to the packager that's
the intent), which is not uncommon.
If we replaced that copyright notice with all the copyright holders from
the package and none of those resulting notices were exactly the same as
the one immediately above the license, we'd actually arguably be violating
the BSD license.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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