You may have seen my earlier post about the tedium of documenting the mishmash of copyright and license declarations in the convenience copies of perl libraries in tests/lib/perl. I have just had a chat with a debian-legal fellow, and while that's not official legal advice, I now feel confident that the assertions below are reliable.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt The notes below are based on the assumption that "the work" occurs at the granularity of the file level. I'm not convinced that we can claim the entire repository is a single "work", which would avoid some (but not all) of the tedium mentioned below. Copyright ========= If a file has no copyright declaration(s), copyright still applies. Therefore adding copyright declarations is NOT REQUIRED, but is RECOMMENDED because it makes it explicit just who owns the work. This applies to *ALL* files (that aren't autogenerated), including documentation, tests and build files. Because there's no copyright assignment for the darcs project, individual files are copyright by the people who performed significant work on them. ("Significant" is not clearly defined.) The darcs repository is publicly accessible; this constitutes "publication". Thus copyrights are for the year in which the associated patches were recorded. It's not hard to rip this information out of the darcs metadata programmatically, although I don't know how to ignore trivial changes. Perhaps we can discard patches that change less than, say, ten lines of the file in question? Licensing ========= If a file has no license declaration, it *is not licensed*. Therefore adding license declarations is REQUIRED. It is *not* sufficient to simply include a COPYING file in the root directory. This applies to *ALL* files (that aren't autogenerated), including documentation, tests and build files. It's not clear to me if we can add a license declaration to a file without checking with the copyright holder. Are contributions to darcs - implicitly "GPL2"; - implicitly "GPL2 or higher"; or - not implicitly licensed? If the last, we need to contact each contributor and get them to agree to license their contributions. Much of this has probably already been done when kowey et al were getting openssl exception agreements. I'll have to go back and look at their message to see if correspondents were agreeing to "GPL2 & openssl exception" or "GPL2+ & openssl exception". _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
