Re: Why we must ship at least some licenses (was: Manoj, ...
On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 10:45:04AM +1000, Drake Diedrich wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 1998 at 02:18:19AM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > We can only enforce it if we ship the license with
> > the package. If you want to be clever about this, I'll not follow you, as I
> > think this is not only asking for legal problems but also bad for the
> > reputation of Debian.
>
> Suppose I take a (fully GPL compliant) source package, unpack it, and
> place the unpacked files on an ftp site. A user could download a GPLed file
> without downloading the license if they wished to. I have still shipped the
> GPL license (it's available from the same ftp site), the user did not accept
> delivery. Even a single archive file could be partially downloaded, and
> miss the GPL license. Too specific an interpretation could ban us from
> shipping anything, because downloads are not guaranteed to be atomic
> operations.
You have fulfilled your duty making it available in the same directory as
the rest of the source. However, for Debian, being a huge distribution, with
many packages and different copyrights, I think we should not be too clever
about this. There are many ways to comply to the letter of the license. You
have mentioned one way. I thing it is also important for us to comply to the
spirit of a copyright. This is the only favour we can (and should) do the
original author.
I think the most natural way is to ship the copyright inside the
data.tar.gz of the binary package, and inside the *.orig.tar.gz file of the
source package. It is also the easiest way I can think of.
Thank you,
Marcus
--
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