Julian Andres Klode <j...@debian.org> writes: > But we do not want to make up our own copyright statements, or go to the > trouble of expanding "Copyright foo contributors" into a list of actual > foo contributors, as that is not legally required, and it's not feasible > to figure out who legally the contributors are (e.g. each git author may > be the contributor, or they may have been acting as a part of a > corporation who will be considered the contributor).
I am not convinced by this argument. Documenting who holds the copyright is useful for various reasons other than being legally required (such as identifying who might need to be contacted for relicensing), and the fact that we cannot promise that the copyright list is comprehensive seems irrelevant to me. It's certainly not *required* to do this, but it sounds like you want to prohibit it, and I don't see the justification for that. > So you need to say something to the effect of: > The debian/copyright file must contain information about the > licensing of the package. This includes all copyright notices > listed in the source code, as well as license grants specified > in the source code. > As a special exceptions, files that are automatically generated > and not installed into binary packages, or otherwise combined > with inputs installed into binary packages, such as autotools files, > may be excluded from the copyright file. This also needs to cover files that are copied, since most of the autotools files are not generated. I don't know what "otherwise combined with inputs installed into binary packages" means; maybe that's trying to get at the copying? If so, the "binary packages" part is insufficient; the source package will routinely contain whatever files were present on the upstream maintainer's system, which may never have appeared in any Debian binary package. > When no copyright notices are given in the source code, a > sentence to that effect shall be included such as: > Copyright: No copyright notices present in code If we're going to introduce new sematics into debian/copyright, I would prefer that have a machine-parsable representation, not use free-form commentary in an existing field. > Packages must not claim additional copyright notices that are not > present in the code, except for package-specific files for which > debian/copyright is likely the sole source of copyright and license > information. Per above, I think I am opposed to this change. > As opposed to copyright notices, license grants need to be preserved > verbatim if required by the license, or the license needs to be > documented. This will need a definition of "license grant." Do you have an example of a license that requires the license grant be preserved? I'm familiar with licenses that require the copyright and license to be preserved verbatim (which is more than a grant) and with licenses that require notification of the licensing be preserved, but I don't think the latter require the license *grant* be preserved verbatim, just the semantic content, no? -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
