Bart Martens <ba...@debian.org> writes: > That "authors" are not the same as "copyright holders" is simply a fact > regardless of what debian-policy states. For example, the programmer > who wrote some software can be the "author" and the company the > programmer was working for can be the "copyright holder".
This is the part I don't find this at all obvious. To me, it's the difference between referring to the collective entity or disassembling it into its constituent parts. Either are usually considered correct; one could say that the Free Software Foundation is the author of GNU time, or that several specific volunteers for the Free Software Foundation are the authors of GNU time, and be correct either way. It sounds like to you the word "author" implies an individual human being always, and isn't correct to use about a collective entity like a volunteer project, non-profit umbrella, or company. > So it is not clear to me where the different interpretation comes from. It's primarily the above, I suspect. I always assumed (and indeed still do believe) that the larger entity for which the programmers are either working or volunteering was a reasonable "author" for this purpose. > Feel free to propose a modification of debian-policy to remove "should > name the original authors", I've opened a Debian Policy bug to discuss clarifying this section, since at the least it's unclear. > but then please follow normal procedure for modifying debian-policy, and > please don't relax current debian-policy on debian-mentors. I don't believe that I'm doing this. :) The opinion I'm expressing here is exactly the opinion that I've applied in all of my own packaging, and which I had, prior to this thread, assumed was the interpretation that everyone held. We're both on the same page about applying the same standards to sponsoring as one would generally apply to any other package in the archive; I think this is just a disagreement over what the existing Policy text means. Now that I've seen this thread, I can certainly see where it's unclear. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87k3yylazh....@windlord.stanford.edu
