Package: vlc Version: 0.8.4-svn20050810-1 Priority: serious Justification: Section 2.3 "Copyright considerations"
The vlc package contains multiple files whose copyright are not detailed in debian/copyright. Moreover, many of these files do _not_ have a license clarification on its header as described http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html so it is unclear whether the GPL applies at all to them. Debian maintainer, please: 1.- Acknowledge all the copyright statements in debian/copyright, you should _not_ do citing them as upstream authors, like you currently do, but with a Copyright section saying: Copyright: Most of the source code is Copyright 1996-2004 The VideoLAN Team. The X library is (c) blah blah blah The X module is (c) blah blah blah 2.- Ask upstream to add proper license statements to all the source code files. There are plenty that don't have a license: src/vlc.c does, but modules/gui/kde/common.h, extras/faad2/plugins/xmms/src/libmp4.c or/extras/faad2/common/mp4ff/mp4tagupdate.c and some others do not. So it dubious that they are under the GPL. Even though there is a COPYING statement saying so they might have been extracted from other program's source code that holds a different license, that's why the recommendations described on http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html should always be followed. The following files have copyright statements not acknowledged in debian/copyright. This is not an exhaustive review, but serves as a sample of this violation: ./modules/gui/kde/common.h: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/disc.h: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/interface.h: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/menu.h: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/net.h: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/slider.h: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/interface.cpp: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/slider.cpp: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/disc.cpp: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/net.cpp: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres ./modules/gui/kde/menu.cpp: copyright : (C) 2001 by andres faad2 is: Copyright (C) 2003-2004 M. Bakker, Ahead Software AG, http://www.nero.com And some plugins of faad2 hold a different (c), for example: ./extras/faad2/plugins/mpeg4ip/faad2.cpp says: ** MPEG4IP plugin for FAAD2 ** Copyright (C) 2003 Bill May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Notice how that neither of these are (c) the VideoLAN team. You acknowledge him as author but don't state his copyright statement verbatim as required by policy. Similary, there is stuff from the Wine project which has (c) assigned to others: ./loader/wine/windef.h: * Copyright 1996 Alexandre Julliard And this only is hardly legal since Eugene Kuznetsov is not part of the Wine project so he can't hold copyright exclusively for: ./loader/loader.h: /******************************************************** Win32 binary loader interface Copyright 2000 Eugene Kuznetsov ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Shamelessly stolen from Wine project ********************************************************/ And these libraries are (c) the VideoLAN team, but also _another_ different organisation holds (c) statements in them: ./modules/codec/cmml/xlist.h: * Copyright (C) 2003-2004 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research * Organisation (CSIRO) Australia * Copyright (C) 2000-2004 the VideoLAN team Those samples were found using this shell commands in the source doe: $ grep -ir copyright . |grep -vi videolan | egrep -v 'debian|doc|po|autotools/' | grep -v m4 |grep -v Makefile | grep -v "Free Software Foundation" |less Notice it strips the FSF (c) since it applies to all the m4 macros, Makefiles and autoconf stuff. There is some stuff that is (c) the FSF that might need to be acknowledged, however (i.e. ./src/extras/getopt1.c). Regards Javier
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