Hi, On 6/12/19 3:01 PM, Wookey wrote: > On 2019-06-12 09:08 +0200, Birger Schacht wrote: >> Dear mentors, >> >> I ITP (#929666) a software that lacks a copyright statement. I asked >> upstream to clarify the copyright in the LICENSE file and upstream now >> plans to use >>> Copyright 2018-2019 github.com/containers authors >> as a copyright statement. This seems a bit vague to me, in my experience >> the copyright statement usually refers to persons or legal entities. >> Would a copyright statement like the one above be acceptable in a >> d/copyright file? Is it even legally valid? > > A copyright ownership statement is not a free software licence, and as > someone pointed out, it defaults to 'entirely proprietary, all rights > reserved', which is not suitable for Debian. The vagueness of the > statement is not really a problem (specific statements tend to be > increasingly out of date over time unless someone keeps them updated, > anyway). But the point is that the software needs to have a free > software licence otherwise it's not free software. So they need to > decide if they want expat/apache/GPL, or something else approved by > the OSI (https://opensource.org/licenses) (or something else followed > by a long argument about whether or not it meets the DFSG - this is a > very foolish route to take without a _really_ good reason), and write > it down.
Thanks, I should have been more clear: the LICENSE file is an Apache-2.0 license and the above mentioned copyright statement is part of the LICENSE file. My question was only about the validity of the Copyright statement ;) > Once they've declared a free licence, Debian is happy. How they choose > to record their authorship copyrights is entirely up to them - just copy it. Okey, I'll do that! cheers, Birger > > Wookey >