Re: Missing copyright clause of debian directory

Xiyue,

On Thursday, June 27, 2024 9:50:18 PM MST Xiyue Deng wrote:
> 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.

That is by far the preferred solution.
 
> 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?

If we are not able to get a response from Thomas (and David), I think there is 
enough information to create the following debian/copyright entry:

Files:  debian/*
Copyright:  2019-2020 Thomas Koch <[email protected]>
                     2019 David Bremner <[email protected]>
License:  GPL-2+

The GPL-2+ license comes from the existing debian/copyright file[1], which 
states that all files are under the GPL-2+.  The copyright holders come from 
the changelog[2], and is a list of everyone who edited files in debian/*.

[1] https://sources.debian.org/src/web-mode/17.0.2-1/debian/copyright/
[2] https://sources.debian.org/src/web-mode/17.0.2-1/debian/changelog/