On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 10:45:04AM +1000, Drake Diedrich wrote: > On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 02:18:19AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > > We can only enforce it if we ship the license with > > the package. If you want to be clever about this, I'll not follow you, as I > > think this is not only asking for legal problems but also bad for the > > reputation of Debian. > > Suppose I take a (fully GPL compliant) source package, unpack it, and > place the unpacked files on an ftp site. A user could download a GPLed file > without downloading the license if they wished to. I have still shipped the > GPL license (it's available from the same ftp site), the user did not accept > delivery. Even a single archive file could be partially downloaded, and > miss the GPL license. Too specific an interpretation could ban us from > shipping anything, because downloads are not guaranteed to be atomic > operations.
You have fulfilled your duty making it available in the same directory as the rest of the source. However, for Debian, being a huge distribution, with many packages and different copyrights, I think we should not be too clever about this. There are many ways to comply to the letter of the license. You have mentioned one way. I thing it is also important for us to comply to the spirit of a copyright. This is the only favour we can (and should) do the original author. I think the most natural way is to ship the copyright inside the data.tar.gz of the binary package, and inside the *.orig.tar.gz file of the source package. It is also the easiest way I can think of. Thank you, Marcus -- "Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@ Marcus Brinkmann http://www.debian.org master.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] for public PGP Key http://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/Marcus.Brinkmann/ PGP Key ID 36E7CD09
