Dear Jan, (I am cc-ing this to debian-mentors some of whom might be able to help.)
I looked at your packaging at: http://www-pool.math.tu-berlin.de/~hesso/deb/nvi_1.81.6-3.dsc I agree that the copyright situation is a bit complex. Basically, Joerg has raised the question because the current debian/copyright does not clarify matters enough. I would try to create a debian/copyright which tries to clearly collate and organise all the copyright assertions in the code. We can then separately worry about interpretations and what an appropriate aggregated copyright is! (A document that will help to organise things is http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat) For example, "grep -rl LICENSE" gives all the files that refer to the file LICENSE which is the BSD 3-clause license file. This reduces the number of files that one needs to examine for variations. Another example. You probably need to include the top portion of regex/COPYRIGHT in debian/copyright according what is stated there. That is the license of Henry Spencer who is the original author. Moreover, he has specifically said that *his* code is _not_ subject to any license of the Regents of the University of California! The _modifications_ to that code are under distributed under BSD-3. This is all a bit painful but I am sure that we will all thank you for this effort. I too will try to help by producing my version of debian/copyright for this package. Regards, Kapil. --
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature