"Andrea Pappacoda" <[email protected]> writes: > On Fri Aug 28, 2026 at 9:20 PM CEST, Marvin Renich wrote:
>> And the MIT-style license includes: >> >> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be >> included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. >> >> And the BSD license: >> >> Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright >> notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. >> >> Debian is not permitted to change or add a date to upstream's >> copyright notice. Doing so violates the license. > I think this refers to the license text itself, not the copyright > notice. The BSD and MIT licenses specifically include the copyright notice. That said, I don't think we have to be too persnicketty about this. I have previously argued that it's fine to consolidate copyright notices for the same author with different years in debian/copyright. This feels similar. Retaining or including the copyright notice doesn't require a byte-for-byte representation, at least IMO. If our notice conveys the same semantic information and we don't break the legal requirements for a copyright notice, transformations like consolidating copyright notices in debian/copyright seems fine? But I would draw the line before adding years, since adding years is a change in the semantic content, not just a formatting change. It's still arguably fine under the license (we are preserving the notice and just adding some additional bits), but it's questionable enough that it feels weird. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
