Re: Missing copyright clause of debian directory

Xiyue Deng <[email protected]> Thu, 27 Jun 2024 21:50:18 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi Nicholas,

Nicholas D Steeves <[email protected]> writes:

> 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
>

Thanks for your reply.  I agree it is important to clear this situation.
I think regardless of how the current situation should be interpreted,
contacting Thomas for confirmation about licensing his packaging work
under a GPL compatible license (preferably the same license) would be a
good step forward.  I'll try to open a bug and initiate from there.

Also I have a few questions to help myself understand the situation.
I'd like to have the following assumption: I intend to believe that when
Thomas worked on packaging web-mode, he probably forgot to add the
copyright justification for `debian/*' by mistake, as we see that he did
it for the package lsp-treemacs[1].  Now, as the upstream uses GPL (v2
initially, upgraded to v3 later), it requires that all derivative works
should be covered by the same license, so AIUI the packaging work should
be covered by GPL by default, but without a clear copyright holder.
With the current "Files: *" wildcard, it should cover the derivative
work under `debian/' (though by mistake).  So my question is: does that
really make this code not DFSG-free?

Thanks.

P.S. For the handling of src:muse-el, I notice that you removed the
copyright section for `File: debian/*', wait until all the relevant
copyright holders to declare their work to be compatible by email,
record them in debian/COPYING.emails[2], before restoring the section of
`File: debian/*'.  I think getting a confirmation from Thomas on one of
the mailing list should serve the same purpose and adding a link to the
email in debian/copyright should suffice in that case.

P.P.S. Just saw Soren's reply before sending this mail, which seems to
align with my speculation.

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/emacsen-team/lsp-treemacs/-/blob/6989a183622eab889dc9c0d40d0853378d069439/debian/copyright
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/emacsen-team/muse-el/-/blob/master/debian/COPYING.emails?ref_type=heads

-- 
Xiyue Deng
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