Open Stack

On 22 October 2013 20:39, Mark McLoughlin <markmc at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-10-22 at 14:19 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> I agree, it is painful, though it is a necessary pain. Debian has always
>> been strict with copyright stuff. This should be seen as a freeness Q/A,
>> so that we make sure everything is 100% free, rather than an annoyance.

What Debian asks for is more than anyone else needs, and I've never
seen a satisfactory explanation for why Debian requires it. The
concordance of licence terms is useful, but the concordance of
copyright holders isn't - a) it's usually wrong and b) it's usually
wrong and c) unless there is a use case like 'I don't want to use code
written by person X', it doesn't serve any purpose ... and it doesn't
serve that case, because copyright claimants != authors.

It saddens me everytime I put a new package together, because it's
such a monumental waste of time.

> A list of copyright holders does nothing to improve the "freeness" of
> OpenStack.

Ack.

>> I'm not saying that this was the case for Trove (the exactitude of the
>> copyright holder list in debian/copyright is less of an issue), though
>> I'm just trying to make you understand that you can't just ignore the
>> issue and say "I don't care, that's Debian's problem". This simply
>> doesn't work (unless you would prefer OpenStack package to *not* be in
>> Debian, which I'm sure isn't the case here).
>
> I can say "Debian policies that no-one can provide any justification for
> is Debian's problem". And that's the case with this supposed "Debian
> requires a complete list of copyright holders" policy.

I agree - and I say this as a Debian Developer :).

The actual policy is:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-copyrightfile
"In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources
(if any) were obtained, and should name the original authors. "

The 'copyright information' for the package is not well defined.
Currently the FTP masters look for a concordance. I think it would be
reasonable to raise a discussion about this - seeking to clarify what
needs to be captured - e.g. 'the package has to have a distribution
license granted by the copyright holders -or- a statement from the
copyright holders that it is in the public domain'. As long as all the
claimed copyright holders are claiming the same license, there is
nothing more needed for either Debian or it's derivatives to be able
to:
 a) use the package
 b) redistribute it [per whatever licence]
 c) filter it if they have license specific policies for some
project/environment

-Rob

-- 
Robert Collins <rbtcollins at hp.com>
Distinguished Technologist
HP Converged Cloud