On 03/02/14 19:43, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> One risk of not having this extra field is that we could accumulate
> excessive things in the Copyright field. E.g. some packagers may be
> including the names of contributors as if they are copyright holders
> because they are afraid their package will be queried (and subsequently
> delayed) by the FTP masters if they left something out by mistake.
I don't think individual packagers can necessarily make an informed
judgement on what this part of Policy requires unless the people who
required it in the first place (the ftp-masters?) can explain the
rationale for this requirement.
I would be inclined to say that the goal for debian/copyright should be
to satisfy these purposes:
* redistribute the package legally (e.g. quote BSD licenses and lists
of copyright holders that have to be quoted in "accompanying
documentation")
* confirm to the ftp-masters that the package is something they're
willing to distribute, both in terms of legal risk and "is this OK
for main?" (e.g. quote non-"common" licenses)
* tell our users what they can do with the package (e.g. quote
non-"common" licenses, and possibly the copyright holders they
need to contact if they want to negotiate a different license)
I'm not sure that a comprehensive list of copyright holders (especially
one comprehensive enough to make relicensing possible) is actually
feasible without doing a lot of upstream work, because anyone who
creates a copyrightable work[1] holds copyright on it, whether they say
so in a copyright statement or not; and not everyone is particularly
thorough about adding copyright statements to things.
As a result, in an attempt to avoid omissions, the copyright files in my
game-related packages are more or less "make something up based on the
commit log, AUTHORS and CREDITS". Many contributors haven't written any
sort of copyright or authorship statement anywhere, let alone a
copyright *year*, but they still hold copyright. In many cases I've used
pseudonyms and either written "no year specified" or assumed that the
copyright year equals the commit date, because that's the best
information I have.
Conversely, openarena-data says "© 2005-2008 OpenArena Team". I added
that to the copyright file, but I'm pretty sure there has never been a
legal entity with that name; so it's actually a bunch of individuals,
not necessarily identical to the list of contributors, who hold
copyright on it.
I'd feel more comfortable about this requirement if it was more like
"copy the copyright statements made by upstream, and any other relevant
copyright information you're aware of", which is much more realistic. Is
that considered to be sufficient by the ftp-masters? In practice, I
suspect that's what everyone does, perhaps augmented by rummaging
through commit logs if they're suspicious about the history of bits of a
project.
S
[1] or has a copyrightable work created on their behalf, in the case
of work-for-hire
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