Package: lunar-applet Version: 1.6-1 Severity: serious Justification: Policy 2.3, I suppose
Lunar-applet is apparently a derivative work of the clock applet in gnome-panel. The gnome-panel source has FSF as the copyright owner, with many authors. However, lunar-applet's packaging documentation /usr/share/doc/lunar-applet/copyright doesn't mention this at all. (The upstream README mentions this, but it's in Chinese. Reading the source makes this obvious, though, as many file in src/ still keeps the original copyright header from gnome-panel.) If it's only missing upstream author information, this bug is probably not "serious" severity. After all, both lunar-applet and the clock applet code are licensed under GPL v2 or later. However, on closer inspection, I found the copyright/licensing situation of lunar-applet very messy: For example, the src/lunar.c is a modified version of the applets/clock/clock.c file in gnome-panel, but the header in lunar.c doesn't say anything about the modification, which probably violates clause 2(a) of GPL v2. Now worse, the file gtkchinesecalendar/gtkchinesecalendar.h claims LGPL v2 license (which by itself needs clarification in Debian's copyright file), but also says it contains code from lunar package with "Copyright (C) 1988,1989,1991,1992 Fung F. Lee and Ricky Yeung", but lunar is GPL v2 or later. I'm not sure if it's possible to mix GPL and LGPL code in one file or one project, but even if it's okay, it should at least be clearly noted. And then things gets ugly -- the file gtkchinesecalendar/tables.h looks like derivative work of lunar code, but the copyright and licensing notice at the top of the file is completely removed, and the file in lunar-applet doesn't have any copyright/licensing information. In summary, I find the copyright and licensing information of lunar-applet package very incomplete and confusing. Some of the code there probably even violates GPL/LGPL. I'm disappointed to see the maintainers doing a poor work on copyright/license auditing, and I'm surprised that this passed through FTP master's inspection. Nevertheless, I hope this bug can cause closer inspection of the whole codebase of lunar-applet. Ming 2007.10.16 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
