On Wed, Mar 14, 2007 at 06:44:43PM +0100, Romain Beauxis wrote: > > > * IMPORTANT: Licence is stated only in the html document... You may ask > > > upstream to include at least a LICENCE or COPYING file, and better add > > > the licence to each headers in code files... > > > > This is all upstream provides, I see no reason that it is not a valid > > licence declaration. The licence is clear in the package as it has been > > added to debian/copyright. > > Nope at all. > Licence is a very important thing for an official upload. You are indeed > right > that it is enought apriori, but copyright and licence has to be enforced. > You may read at this place: > http://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html > "Be sure that you correctly document the license of the package. We often > find > packages having a GPL COPYING file in the source, but if one goes and looks > at every file there are a few here and there having different licenses in > them, sometimes as bad as You aren't allowed to do anything with this file, > and if you do we will send our lawyers to you. Of course it's hard to check a > tarball with thousands of files (think about X, KDE, Kernel or similar big > packages), but most of the tarballs aren't that big. Also not-nice is a > package, itself being GPL, having documentation licensed with a non-free > license, like the CC licenses. Makes the original tarball non-free, this is > one of the cases where you need to repackage it (look in the archive for > examples, mostly having .dfsg. in their tarballs name)." > > In other words, even though upstream claims some global licence for the > entire > project, some files may have a different headers.. And under the assumption > that no licence is *not* a free licence the individual licence for each > source file could be different. > > Again, it may be the case that the package is truly under the GPL file by > file, but I would not upload anything until you have done something, which > can be either to contact upstream and ask if individual files are under the > same copyright, propose him to add copyright to each file, and, better, patch > to add this after he may have answered it is the case.
Well, I was going to say 'none of the files have a different licence' but it appears upstream are linking against something with an 'all rights reserved' notice and distributing it under the GPL. I shall be more diligent in future, this was not something I was expecting. Does Debian _actually_ require licence information to be added to every file? As an upstream I would consider that unreasonable when I have clearly given the licence elsewhere. If not, what would be sufficient? Must all upstreams be asked whether their stated copyright on the work is correct file-by-file? Also, thanks for the manpages tip. Matt -- Matthew Johnson
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