Home page > Debian > Debian Social Contract and copyright notices

Debian Social Contract and copyright notices

Sunday 6 September 2009, by Toots

So, the gmerlin-avdecoder package was rejected for the following reason:

missing license/copyright statements:

lib/base64.c: * Copyright (c) 1998-2000 University College London lib/base64.c: * Copyright (c) 1991 Bell Communications Research, Inc. (Bellcore) BSD license

(...)

I would like to publicaly express my disagreement with this justification.

The reason is simple: I signed as a developper because I wanted to maintain free software packages. For that purpose, I agreed with the Debian Social Contract [1], which contains what we consider as the required and essential facts needed for a software to be considered free. These are the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG).

The spirit of these guidelines is to give general concerns about what should and should not be a free software. That is very good because it allows to modulate and debate about this and that particular issue and situation.

For instance, it was not clear until recently whether the debian developper body agreed that the GNU GFDL license [2] was or not a free license. For that purpose, we have a procedure [3] which allows to decide on those topics, the general resolution.

In the case of the GFDL license, for instance, it was decided [4] that the fact that some parts were not modifiable was not consistent with the DFSG, so packages containing documents licensed under the GFDL have to go to the non-free archive, unless there is no so-called invariant parts. That’s pretty fair.

Another principle on which we agree is that we should not hide our problems. In particular, and in order to make sure that we really ship packages that contain free software, each debian package comes with a copyright file. This file should be filled with all the informations related to the rights attached to the source shipped by the package.

Hence, by reading the content of the copyright file, anyone using our packages should be able to trust the fact that he is indeed using a free software, as long as he agrees on our definition of such a free software.

Also, in order to maintain our archive in a proper state, we have a special task in the project which consists in reviewing the new packages that enter in the archive. This task includes the verification that it is legal to distribute the package, as well as the consistence between its declared license and the various archives.

My concern here is that I do not believe that the informations provided by the complete list of copyright notice has something to do with these issues. The concern for the DFSG is about what you can actually do with the software, and, unless used for proving that a source code should be in the public domain, I do not know any restriction on the source code that would be implied by the copyright notices instead of the license.

For these reasons, it does not appear correct to me to reject a package based on the fact that some copyright notices are missing, as long as all the license information is present in the copyright file. Of course, it is important to have some copyright information in this file, but I believe that the notice of the main authors and maintainers should be sufficient.

That said, I have asked this question in private to some developpers, and apparently there is no will to do a move on this issue. Hence, it does not appear that these ideas repesent a majority of the developpers, and I will then conform to this requirement for now on.

However, I wanted to publicaly express my disagreement, which is done now.

Footnotes

[1] http://www.debian.org/social_contract

[2] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

[3] http://www.debian.org/devel/constit...

[4] http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001

13 Forum messages

  • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 06:24 , by Aigars Mahinovs

    A copyright statement without a licence means ’all rights reserved’ = no licence = no rights to use this work are granted to anyone in any shape or form.

    Reply to this message

  • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 06:24 , by pabs

    Er, the BSD license requires reproduction of the copyright information in both source and binary redistributions. Do you want Debian to violate the license and possibly get sued?

    Reply to this message

    • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 08:50 , by Toots

      BSD license says:

      * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
      notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

      The distribution of the source code should *always* include the copyright statements.

      The copyright file is a different thing. This files sums up the various information, it is an addition, and in no way it is required by the license.

      Reply to this message

      • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 12:40

        Looking at base64 it says: * 2. 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. I guess some court could be easily persuaded that a .deb is binary distribution. (It does not say "accompanied" as GPL, it only speaks of binary forms). I understand that keeping that information correct is hard. But making sure upstream does not slip in some non-free code copies from elsewhere without thinking is hard too. Noone is punishing you for not doing your job. But please do not complain if others are doing your job.

        Reply to this message

        • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 17:56 , by Toots

          Charles Plessy already argued that the binary and source packages form a single unit, which is consistent with the GPL requirement.

          Please try to restrain about judgement on whether I do my job or not. That is really not the point.

          Reply to this message

  • debian/copyright is a deviation from Upstream. Le 6 September 2009 à 10:34 , by Charles Plessy

    I strongly agree with your point of view.

    To me, the Debian copyright file is one of the many deviations from
    Upstream that we accumulate. I think that we should rather use the
    AUTHORS and README files when relevant and available, and forward
    patches when we think that some information is missing.

    The SPI lawyers have been asked to comment on whether reproducing the
    copyright statements of license à la BSD is necessary in our binary
    packages, given that it is already assumed that they form a single
    unit with the source packages (otherwise we could not redistribute
    GPLed software).

    I hope that the answer will provide us a good argument to bring some
    change on the way the copyright statements are managed in Debian, so
    that we can concentrate on the fun part of packaging.

    Reply to this message

    • debian/copyright is a deviation from Upstream. Le 6 September 2009 à 18:11 , by Toots

      Thanks. I agree that the answer about the BSD license should be ground for a proposal on this topic.

      On the (unlikely) case where the copyright statement is said to be necessary in the binary package, then it would be needed to copy them in the copyright, at least when the license is BSD or any other license that has a similar requirement.

      Reply to this message

  • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 13:14 , by Josip Rodin

    You appear not to have read the text of the BSD license. It is in /usr/share/common-licenses/BSD on your system, and it clearly states:

    2. 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.

    A Debian package is a binary form of redistribution. If the package does not carry all the copyright statements (in the copyright file or elsewhere), it breaks the licence, therefore there is no license to distribute, therefore your package is invalid and Debian should not distribute it.

    What is so hard to understand about that? It’s simple legal logic, and also it’s simple courtesy to copyright holders.

    Reply to this message

    • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 18:01 , by Toots

      A debian package is a binary package and a source package. As for the GPL, we clearly ship all required copyright statement in the source package.

      It would be really mean to try to sue Debian because we would supposedly not ship the copyright statements, while each binary packages is accompanied with the full corresponding source.

      This requirement of the BSD license, to my mind, concerns only the case where the source code is used without distributing the corresponding source, which is what the BSD license allows compared to the GPL for instance.

      I like your point about courtesy. However, we are talking here about legal requirement. If you want, as a courtesy, to acknowledge all upstream copyright, please do so, but it does not make it a requirement.

      Reply to this message

      • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 20:34 , by Josip Rodin

        A Debian binary package in form of a single file is the smallest individual unit which is being regularly redistributed, so we have to make sure we satisfy the license in that case. We do not want to force all users to *have* to get source packages in order to satisfy license terms.

        It’s unclear to me what would actually be wrong with simply following the current policy. You don’t like to grep, copy&paste or something? :)

        Reply to this message

        • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 20:57 , by Toots

          Ok, this has to be sorted out about BSD and binary packages.

          The reason why I do not simply abid with the current policy is because first the issue has never been dediced, and secondly because I prefer to question the real facts and motivations than to follow blindly something I do not agree/understand.

          My current point would be that, just as for GFDL, copyright notice is mandatory when the license makes it mandatory, and not otherwise. That would be fair.

          Reply to this message

  • Debian Social Contract and copyright notices Le 6 September 2009 à 16:40

    Did you rise your concerns on the proper channel, the technical comitee?

    Reply to this message

Reply to this article