* Joerg Jaspert: > Honestly, if you cant deal with listing the Authors/(C) holders - dont > maintain a package. It is not much work to list them.
It is, if upstream doesn't provide such a list. And it is my firm belief that if upstream fails to maintain an accurate copyright record and releases the software und a free software license, we have got implicit permission to redistribute it without proper attribution to individual contributors, no matter what the license says. The same argument applies to keeping track of changes (which is the most widely violated GPL requirement, I guess). And take a typical GNU project: You don't know who has effectively assigned copyright to the FSF, so you can't reasonably claim that the FSF is the sole copyright holder--and listing authors from the changelog is equally wrong. If the information is copied into the copyright file manually (I don't think you're supposed to auto-generated debian/copyright anyway), it will bit-rot pretty quickly. Even now, we miss fundamental licensing changes--for instance, the transition from GPL+BSD to BSD for pcre3. I think an accurate copyright record is necessary to exercise free software freedoms, but many upstreams disagree, and we have to cope with that discrepancy somehow. Package removal is certainly not the answer (we shouldn't remove Iceweasel or the kernel). -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
