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On 20 October 2013 02:35, Monty Taylor <mordred at inaugust.com> wrote:

> However, even as a strong supporter of accurate license headers, I would
> like to know more about the FTP masters issue. I dialog with them, as
> folks who deal with this issue and its repercutions WAY more than any of
> us might be really nice.

Debian takes it's responsibilities under copyright law very seriously.
The integrity of the debian/copyright metadata is checked on the first
upload for a package (and basically not thereafter, which is either
convenient or pragmatic or a massive hole in rigour depending on your
point of view. The goal is to ensure that a) the package is in the
right repository in Debian (main vs nonfree) and b) that Debian can
redistribute it and c) that downstreams of Debian who decide to use
the package can confidently do so. Files with differing redistribution
licenses that aren't captured in debian/copyright are an issue for c);
files with different authors and the same redistribution licence
aren't a problem for a/b/c *but* the rules the FTP masters enforce
don't make that discrimination: the debian/copyright file needs to be
a concordance of both copyright holders and copyright license.

Personally, I think it should really only be a concordance of
copyright licenses, and the holders shouldn't be mentioned, but thats
not the current project view.

-Rob

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