Ben Finney <bign...@debian.org> writes:

> That does require “Derivative Works […] must include a readable copy of
> the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file […] in at
> least one of the following places: […] within the Source form or
> documentation, if provided along with the Derivative Works; […]”.

> Do you think the routine inclusion of those notices, in the package's
> ‘copyright’ file, does not satisfy the above clause?

It does if you actually include the entire contents of NOTICE in the
copyright file, and are meticulous about updating debian/copyright every
time upstream changes the NOTICE file.  I definitely do not trust myself
to do this, particularly when just installing the NOTICE file is trivial
with our packaging tools and makes the problem go away completely.

Perhaps you were under the assumption that the NOTICE file contains only
the copyright and license statement that we would naturally put in
debian/copyright anyway?  While there are *some* Apache 2.0 packages where
this is the case, there is nothing about the Apache 2.0 license that
requires this, and there are definitely packages where this is *not* the
case.

While there are other ways to satisfying the Apache 2.0 requirement, I
strongly believe that the best approach for *Debian* as a whole to take is
to just routinely install the NOTICE file as part of the package
documentation.  This is simple, foolproof, trivial to do, and lets us
forget about this issue entirely rather than carefully analyzing the
situation or remembering to resync copies of the upstream file.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Reply via email to