Robert Collins <robe...@robertcollins.net> writes:
> On Wed, 2009-06-10 at 15:57 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>
>>> Does Debian only care about listing copyright holders, as opposed to
>>> reproducing legally meaningful copyright statements? If so, why not
>>> just list names here, excluding the word "Copyright" and excluding
>>> the years.
>> Because we have to comply with licenses that say that we need to
>> reproduce the copyright notice.
> I'm not clear how that applies to the debian/copyright file.
The BSD license says, in part:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
A binary Debian package is a redistribution in binary form. We rely on
this license to grant us the ability to distribute that binary form. We
must therefore comply with that license.
The "above copyright notice" does not appear anywhere else in a binary
Debian package other than in debian/copyright.
Therefore, in order for that binary package to be legal to distribute
under the BSD license, the debian/copyright file must contain "the above
copyright notice," whatever that may be. Either that or we have to
invent some other location in which to put it, but this is the intended
purpose of debian/copyright.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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