> > If it's copyrighted under the GPL, then that's the copyright. On Thu, May 04, 2000 at 05:01:54PM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: > Would you be happier if the author was forced to write up his own > license from scratch instead? Why? It would probably result in a > badly-thought-out mess.
No, I would not be happier. But, I don't see this being necessary. I'd prefer to look at this requirement (that the notice be distributed with the software) as a regulatory requirement than as a copyright requirement. U.S. Government agencies, after all, are allowed to issue regulations. This means that there's no copyright entanglement. U.S. citizens would have to obey the regulations as long as there are U.S. laws that the regulations implement -- as would non-U.S. citizens, if their governments have some sort of treaty with the U.S. that makes the regulation relevant -- but such activities of governments are outside the scope of Debian. Debian developers are locally responsible for obeying local laws and regulations, but that's on an individual basis, and is not a copyright issue. We can adopt a consistent and reasonable set of policies about copyright issues, because copyright is fairly consistent across a large number of countries, and across time. It's quite a bit harder to adopt consistent and reasonable policies about laws and regulations which are not consistent from place to place (or from time to time). In particular: export restrictions placed by the U.S. government on textual material are very weird. If we can keep such issues out of copyrights altogether, that would be best. -- Raul
