Dear David,
On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 11:37:58AM +, David Hart wrote:
> >- Various stanzas do not include the copyright years, yet these are
> > available in the files. The Copyright: field is meant to contain the
> > copyright claim as it was stated by the upstream author..
>
> May I ask which tool you used for that? I've found debmake -kk the best I've
> tried, but it doesn't check for dates.
>
> I've gone through by hand and added all that I found.
Of course: licensecheck --copyright -r .
> >- Files in .build/ remain, and are not given in d/copyright.
>
> The remaining ones are my own files. Won't they be covered by '*'?
Oh, sorry, I assumed you hadn't written 4pane.m4. Not so many people
know m4, as I understand it :)
> >- Files: bitmaps/iceweasel.png
> > Copyright: Uncertain
> >
> >Files: bitmaps/kedit.xpm
> >Copyright: Unknown
> >
> >Files: bitmaps/kwrite.xpm
> >Copyright: Various
> >
> >The ftp-masters would be very likely to reject these. Since you found
> >the source repos, surely you can find a name for the copyright fields?
>
> I tried hard, but failed to find definite copyright authors for these and
> other bitmaps; I therefore added 'Comment:' fields. In detail:
I understand, and appreciate that this is quite a frustrating time sink.
> [...]
> With the possible exception of kedit, all of these icons are or were included
> in
> other debian packages, so it would be surprising if there is no solution short
> of removal. In general, what currently acceptable ways are there to fill the
> Copyright field when an author isn't specified for a particular element of a
> package?
What we are hitting up against here is a limitation of the DEP-5
copyright format, which can make it seem like listing all authors is
more important than establishing that the work is under a free license.
Having read the results of your research, I suggest the following
approach:
- insert all the authorship info you've managed to find thus far -- no
reason to throw away that effort -- in the Copyright: field, not
Comment:.
In the situation where you have a list of project authors but it is
unlikely that they all worked on the icon file, just list them all,
and put "Comment: These are the authors for the upstream project from
which this file was obtained."
- for the files where it is not clear, write a copyright string based on
the project name. E.g. for kedit.xpm, "(C) 1999 kde-artist team"
If this doesn't sound sane, it might be best to ask debian-legal. But I
think we could go ahead and upload and see what the ftp-masters think of
my proposed solution.
> Finally, my ITP has timed-out and the package removed from
> mentors. Does this now matter?
We don't need mentors since I am working out of your git repo. Your ITP
does not appear to have timed out. If the RFS gets closed, you can just
re-open it.
--
Sean Whitton
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