Hello Soren,
Thank you for answering my queries.
I will share this with the upstream project. The project authors are unsure how
to do this for an LGPL project. I will see tomorrow if I can find an example of
an LGPL project that includes the copyright information in the root of the
project.
(I found a project that does this for GPL[1], but not for LGPL).
[1] https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/blob/master/COPYRIGHT
Regards,
Alan
On 3/4/24 23:49, Soren Stoutner wrote:
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
