Re: [Monotone-debian] debian/copyright needs rewriting?

[Richard Levitte]

In message <address@hidden> on Thu, 28 Feb 2008 08:16:59 -0500, "Zack Weinberg" 
<address@hidden> said:

zackw> Neither COPYING (which is just the GPL, and that's as it should
zackw> be) nor AUTHORS actually contains the sort of unambiguous
zackw> statement of copyright that it seems is wanted.  With Graydon
zackw> no longer participating, I feel less weird about revising his
zackw> rather idiosyncratic lead-in to AUTHORS, but I'm not really
zackw> sure what to put there, especially not so that there is a nice
zackw> short thing to copy into debian/copyright.

Graydon participating or not doesn't matter, he owns the copyright on
the stuff he's written until he signs over the copyright to someone
else (and all files are updated accordingly).

I'm not sure what you mean with "lead-in", care to clarify?

zackw> Note that I asked debian-legal a few months ago about the
zackw> complications from having all the third-party libraries in the
zackw> source package and was told that I should copy the *entire
zackw> text* of AUTHORS into debian/copyright.  Which is nuts and I'm
zackw> not doing it.

We might have to.  As I understand it, debian/copyright is supposed to
contain not only a copyright statement (which is basically a single
(C) line for each author), but also the license for the package as
well as for each bundled component.

The trouble is that AUTHORS doesn't contain copyright statements for
monotone itself, it just contains a list of authors.  It does contain
copyright AND license statements for most of the bundles components,
though.

I'm starting to think that I should create a script that goes through
the whole versioned source and pick out every copyright statement I
can find, then sort on name and uniquify...

I'll tell ya, when copyright law is involved, there's suddenly a LOT
of work to do.  Been there, done that, disgusted by it every time...
Unfortunately, I understand pretty well how it works...

Cheers,
Richard

-- 
Richard Levitte                         address@hidden
                                        http://richard.levitte.org/

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including
 the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
                                                -- C.S. Lewis