Hi Manoj, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > o) It should name the original authors -- which, in my view, is > distinct from every subsequent contributor. This can bea matter of > subjective interpretation, though.
Allow me to disagree. While in common language "original" can be used in the sense of "initial" as your interpretation seems to suggest, this is clearly and consistently not the case in the context of copyright. In fact, "original author" is a something of a technical term in this domain. A definition capturing the common meaning of this term can be found e.g. in the CC licenses. In CC 3.0 it starts with "Original Author" means, in the case of a literary or artistic work, the individual, individuals, entity or entities who created the Work ... The works Debian distributes are more often than not the result of a collaborative effort. As such, anyone with a (original, i.e. creative) contribution to the work is an original author, and not just whoever started a project. Debian sees increased enforcement of properly documenting copyright status because the people who recently joined the FTP team were instructed to check for this and pointed to the publicly available reject faq and the two announcements on debian-devel-announce that explicitly state that copyright notices must be listed and have not been met with opposition when they were posted five and again three years ago. Properly documenting the copyright license well includes listing the licensor and the basis of the license, i.e. including the copyright notice. If Debian absolutely wants to decide it does not care about who grants the copyright license, then it has to do so. It might not, however, be quite necessary to pretend that the ftp team who try to diligently do the job that has been entrusted to them, including (manually, mostly, not that much less tedious as compiling them) double-check that the stuff put on Debian mirrors is prima facie legally distributable is getting fun out of making up reject reasons. I do not envy anyone to have to wade through things to collect these notices and looking at hundreds of license boilerplates but having found stuff like "proprietary property of IBM" in openjdk (probably vetted by people paid to know what they are doing) or KDE themes with an PNGs from a KDE icon collection and the express clarification that GPL requires distributing SVG source with any pixel formats, I can assure you that if Debian is interested in credibly attempting to ensure that the stuff put on mirrors is legal to distribute someone has to look at every file in the tarballs. Kind regards T. -- Thomas Viehmann, http://thomas.viehmann.net/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
