On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Ben Finney <[email protected]>wrote:
> Aliaksei Sheshka <[email protected]> writes: > > > 1) should a package 'inherit' license from the original COPYING file if > > not stated otherwise ? > > I don't know how to understand that sentence. > > If you are asking whether the mere presence of a ‘COPYING’ file, but no > explicit license grant, applies to files in the package: the answer is > no, the mere presence of a license text does not imply any grant of > license. > > The grant needs to be explicit, written, specifying exactly what work is > being licensed, in a statement from the copyright holder. Ideally of the > form: > > This is <NAME OF WORK>, consisting of <SPECIFIC FILES>. You may <DO > THESE SPECIFIC THINGS> with this work under the terms <FULL LICENSE > TERMS OR UNAMBIGUOUS REFERENCE TO FULL LICENSE TERMS>. > Does that count: "Several parties hold copyright to various parts of IRRToolSet. One or more of the following licenses may apply to the code contained within this distribution." , or too unclear ? > > > 2) Which license do have auto generated files, like 'configure', > > 'Makefile', *am', etc ? > > If there is no human creativity in the generation of the files, then my > understanding of international copyright law is that such files are not > subject to copyright and hence they are merely an automatic non-creative > transformation from the source form of the work; they would be under > whatever license the source document is under. > > You should consult your lawyer though. (You can also consult the > ‘debian-legal’ forum, who may also advise you to consult your lawyer.) > > > 3) What to do if a file have authors, licence, but a copyright year ? > > I don't know how to understand that sentence; I guess you men “but … > does not have a copyright year”. > > If so, you need to gather that information yourself; contacting the > copyright holders directly to answer your questions would be one way. > Policy is there not complain but to obey, I know. I chose couple of random packets, most likely I don't understand something If consider file http://irrtoolset.isc.org/browser/trunk/src/peval/peval.cc I can't understand what is copyright date is. Don't get me wrong, Idea of a machine-readable copyright file is a good thing. Butt I picked couple of random packets, and none of them have that new format. I don know any real life proper multi-license new format Debian package to use as a reference, which makes packaging for beginner even harder. I'm asking to check file above in order to understand what is missing and ask proper questions to upstream. > >
