Bart Martens <ba...@debian.org> writes: > On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 12:54:10AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: >> 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. > I don't see this as "the collective entity" and "constituent parts". > Being an author doesn't make one a copyright holder. And being a > copyright holder doesn't make one an author. The terms "author" and > "copyright holder" are different terms with different meanings. > Of course, some/many/most authors are also copyright holders of their > works, but not always. Authors and copyright holders of the same works > can be different parties with different interests. Ah! Yes. I see your point here, and agree with it. I was indeed way too sloppy in how I was talking about this. In this case, I would consider the FSF both the copyright holder *and* the author (in a collective sense), since the people who worked on the software did so under the aegis of the FSF. It was an FSF project written by FSF volunteers as part of the overall GNU project (like most GNU software). But I could see the case where those things could be quite distinct, even when involving the FSF (for example, if I remember correctly, the Objective C GCC frontend wasn't written by the FSF and was contributed to the FSF after the fact by separate authors who wouldn't have thought of themselves as part of the FSF). That's a difficult distinction to draw if there isn't good upstream documentation of the origin of the software. So I suppose it would be generally safer to list the actual people, since that way you wouldn't get it wrong if you misunderstood the organizational affiliation. -- 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/878vfejt43....@windlord.stanford.edu
