On 2024-03-04 11:19 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > Alan, > > These are good questions. > > 1. Yes, there must be a copyright statement. Only the person, people, > group, > or organization that holds the copyright can issue a license for other people > to use the work. So, you must have someone claiming a copyright or they do > not have the legal ability to release the work to others under the LGPL.
But what requires that to be in the source tarball? Copyright is intrinsic in the authors, it doesn't require a statement to create it. Said authors _do_ need to specify a licence (and the LGPL requires that licence text to be shipped in the source (I think, although I could only actually find this requirement for a 'Combined work' and in the FAQ just now)). _Debian_ requires a copyright statement (in the copyright file) so we do need to find out from the project what to put, and a statement in the source would be a good way to communicate that, but a notice on the project website or even an email from a representative would also do the job. > My recommendation would be that you communicate to the upstream project that > they need to include the copyright and licensing information in the root of > their repository, preferably all in one file, as a minimum requirement for > you > to be willing to package their project in Debian. I don't think this is correct. And we should be happy to package anything which is actually free software. We don't get to impose extra requirements before we will package something. They should put a copy of the LGPL in (in a file called 'COPYING' or 'LICENCE' by convention) (if this isn't done already). A copyright notice for the project should _not_ go in the same file (The LGPL already has one for the LGPL authorship itself, so this is probably the only file in the distribution which should definitiely _not_ have the project copyright notice). It should ideally be a header on at least one source file, (preferably all of them), but could be any README, or even just a notice on the project website, or an email saying ' Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
