On Wed, Jan 12, 2005 at 05:47:57PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> This makes lots of sense to me, as Debian needs to continually
> reaffirm its freeness. Its really good to be able to say "What
> specific free license is $pkg under?", and then readily find out
> without having to download the source, or google, or grep, or ...
>
> The disclaimer, I guess, is supposed to be "relevent information".
>
> Craig, can you add anything to this, or provide pointers?
dh_make uses the templates from /usr/share/debhelper/dh-make/licenses
with the exception of Native packages which use
/usr/share/debhelper/dh-make/native/copyright
Section 12.5 of the policy states the file should contain:
* "verbatim copy of its copyright and distribution license"
* "where the upstream sources (if any) were obtained"
* "name the original authors of the package"
* "Debian maintainer(s) who were involved with its creation"
The copyright is different to the license (it used to be incorrectly
combined in old dh-make templates). I may own the copyright but the
program is licensed under the GPL, for example.
The current dh-make templates use the three clauses from the GPL.
The reason is a combination of factors:
* Policy says the copyright file needs the distribution license
* The distribution license (GPL) says you should include those lines,
see "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs"
Therefore for a package to comply with Debian policy and the GPL it
must mention it is licensed under GPL and strongly should include the
three GPL clauses. It don't think it must include those three clauses
but it is a good idea to.
- Craig
--
Craig Small GnuPG:1C1B D893 1418 2AF4 45EE 95CB C76C E5AC 12CA DFA5
Eye-Net Consulting http://www.enc.com.au/ MIEE Debian developer
csmall at : enc.com.au ieee.org debian.org
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