Alan, These are good questions.
1. Yes, there must be a copyright statement. Only the person, people, group, or organization that holds the copyright can issue a license for other people to use the work. So, you must have someone claiming a copyright or they do not have the legal ability to release the work to others under the LGPL. 2. No, it is not required that each individual file contain a copyright statement or the header of the LGPL at the top. The FSF recommends such as a best practice, and I would agree that it is desirable, but it is not required. My recommendation would be that you communicate to the upstream project that they need to include the copyright and licensing information in the root of their repository, preferably all in one file, as a minimum requirement for you to be willing to package their project in Debian. Soren On Sunday, March 3, 2024 11:06:30 PM MST Alan M Varghese wrote: > Sent message incorrectly to debian-mentors-request instead of debian- mentors. > Correcting. > > > -------- Forwarded Message -------- > Subject: Copyright in LGPL projects > Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2024 11:10:58 +0530 > From: Alan M Varghese <a...@digistorm.in> > To: 1065...@bugs.debian.org > CC: Matthias Geiger <werdah...@riseup.net>, SmartList > <debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org> > > Hello Mentors, > > I have been working on packaging Hyprland window manager. > hyprlang[0] (with a 'g') is a new dependency for this project. This project > (hyprlang) is licensed under LGPL. > > But, the project authors haven't included a copyright notice anywhere in the > project. It turns out that the authors are not sure if this is required for > an LGPL project[1]. > > From a Debian perspective, what is the recommendation regarding this? Do we > require projects to include the copyright information along with LGPL? > > If the copyright *has* to be included, is it enough to include it in a > COPYRIGHT file? I couldn't find an example of a project that does this. Most > projects seem to include a copyright line along with a short form of LGPL in > each file. (I think it may be more appealing to upstream authors if we don't > have to include the copyright in every file). > > For example, libplacebo[2] is a library I found installed on my system that > uses LGPL. This project does not have a common copyright file, but there are > copyright notices in some source files[3]. While some other source files in > this project do not have a copyright notice[4][5][6]. > > Note: my doubts are specifically regarding the LGPL license. For other > licenses like BSD, I see both practices of including a COPYRIGHT file as well > as a short copyright notice in each file, or a combination of the two. > > Thanks, > Alan M Varghese > > [0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1065352 > [1] https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprlang/issues/28 > [2] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo > [3] > https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo/-/blob/master/src/dither.c? ref_ > type=heads [4] > https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo/-/blob/master/src/dummy.c? ref_t > ype=heads [5] > https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo/-/blob/master/src/cache.c? ref_t > ype=heads [6] > https://code.videolan.org/videolan/libplacebo/-/blob/master/src/ colorspace.c? > ref_type=heads -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
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