Steve: Hmm. As I said I'm not a lawyer, and you raise some valid points :-)
Could we perhaps at least update the copyright years? I'm not sure if that really makes sense, though, because I don't think Ian Jackson has been actively working on the Policy for awhile. I suppose copyright of the Policy Manual isn't a huge issue. It just seems strange to me that for an operating system that keeps its copyright so rigorously tracked, we are a bit lacking in a document as important as the Policy. I, however, have nothing really all that useful to propose, since I'm not a lawyer. Perhaps we can speak to debian-legal about this sort of thing. I'm glad to see a bit of discussion around this happening, maybe it's a minor TODO we can think about. Cheers, Jonathan On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 6:53 PM, Steve Langasek<vor...@debian.org> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 01:57:04PM -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote: >> Even if it's not enforceable, I think something with a more recent >> date is better than nothing. So I'm happy with adding a copyright line >> for "Debian Policy List Contributors" or something. > > That's worse than nothing. There is no entity named "Debian Policy List > Contributors" that holds any copyright on this document, and we should not > include patently false copyright notices. > >> Maybe it should be part of the Teams/Policy "constitution" that anyone >> contributing to the Debian Policy Manual signs off copyright to the >> SPI Inc. > > I have no objection to assigning the copyright for any of my own > contributions to the policy manual, but SPI doesn't have a framework in > place for doing copyright assignment today (and even with the FSF, who have > quite a bit of experience with this, the copyright assignment process is > somewhat onerous). > > In practice, the only reason we need to care about getting a comprehensive > list of copyright holders is if we want to relicense the document, and that > requires not only a list of the copyright holders but also a consensus to > relicense. So this is really a minor issue. > > -- > Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS > Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. > Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ > slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org > > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
