Re: Missing copyright clause of debian directory

Nicholas D Steeves <[email protected]> Wed, 26 Jun 2024 18:13:38 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> writes:

> As an additional followup, as the original debian/* files were licensed GPLv2+, 
> if you edit a file you can choose to make your contribution GPLv3+, which would 
> convert the entire file to GPLv3+.  If you end up editing all of the files in 
> debian/* at least once, you could convert the entire copyright entry to 
> GPLv3+.
>

Soren, would you please provide evidence for "the original debian/*
files were licensed GPLv2+"?  It looks to me like:

1. Thomas Koch gained copyright on fixation (ie: automatic in Berne
Convention countries)
2. Thomas Koch did not license his work
:. Thomas Koch retains "all rights reserved" and our web-mode has never
actually been dfsg-free

3. Alternatively one could argue this: The initial packaging is not
sufficiently original for debian/* to be copyrightable; however, this is
a question for lawyers, because it varies by jurisdiction.

  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4620875#:~:text=Originality%20is%20a%20pre%2Dcondition,been%20copied%20from%20another%20work.
  https://academic.oup.com/jiplp/article-pdf/13/8/597/25099746/jpy084.pdf

4. Also, if this is the case than it is *wrong* to declare Koch's
copyright and speculative license.

In conclusion, Thomas Koch needs to be contacted and a record needs to
exist on Debian infrastructure.  So either on-list, or on the BTS, or
the method I had to use in src:muse-el, which is a package Xiyue Deng
(manphiz) maintains and must therefore be familiar with.

Regards,
Nicholas

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