tags/copyrightzack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/tags/copyright/zack's home pageikiwiki2009-11-28T12:00:16Zon copyright noticeshttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2009/09/on_copyright_notices/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2009-09-06T10:57:54Z
<h1><small>(... and the BSD license)</small></h1>
<p>Two comments about <a href=
"http://blog.rastageeks.org/">Romain</a>'s <a href=
"http://blog.rastageeks.org/spip.php?article45">recent
REJECT</a>.</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>The specific case concerns a BSD-licensed source file. With
respect to copyright notices BSD is rather peculiar, as can be read
in the <a href=
"http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.html">license
text</a>, at its second point</p>
<pre><code> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution.
</code></pre>
<p>So, the requirement of mentioning in
<code>debian/copyright</code> authors (or, more precisely, all
copyright owners appearing in a given source package) has nothing
to do with DFSG, it is a requirement imposed by the license
itself.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I actually don't think that « <em>there is no will to do a move
on this issue</em> », quite the contrary. The last time the issue
was raised (remember the giantic thread on copyright authors of
several months ago?), I got the impression that there <em>is</em> a
widespread will of getting rid of the burden of maintaining
copyright lists up to date. What is not clear is whether, for
licenses other than BSD, it is actually legally acceptable to do
that.</p>
<p>This issue is one of the pending questions that has been posed
(by the DPL) to the SPI lawyer. AFAIK, no answer has been received
yet. I "just" lack a bit more of visibility on these issues (e.g. a
wiki page with pending queries to SPI lawyer) so that we avoid
running in circles, as we are doing here.</p>
</li>
</ol>