The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: non-free/contrib package maintainers

On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, joost witteveen wrote:

> > > > Asking each maintainer to unpack the source archives and send in the
> > > > copyrights is basically just a duplication of effort with what they've
> > > > already done with the /usr/doc/.../copyright file.
> > > 
> > > Yeah, and if that file doesn't exist, you can request the licence
> > > via the bug tracking system.
> > > 
> > > Really, the /usr/doc/.../copyright file is the best we could come
> > > up as "licence" in the first place. If I were to reply to you anthing
> > > other than "mail aqy6633@acf5.nyu.edu < /usr/doc/.../copyright", I
> > > should probably change my debian sources, and modify that copyright file.
> > > 
> > > And, just extracting all non-free .deb's and getting the copyright file
> > > isn't all that big an efford, I'd say. One or two lines of bash should do it
> > > (long lines, ok,..).
> > 
> > Yes, and Jim already did that. The simple problem is is that in many of
> > them I just find the following line: 
> > see file <...> for license description. (and alike)
> > 
> > I don't think two long lines of shell script would get me that file 
> > along with /usr/doc/<package>/copyright
> 
> So, we've got another script for those packages: /usr/bin/bug.
> 
> As far as I remember, non-free pacakges really have to have
> a complete licence (or am I wrong here?).

You're absolutely right. But not only non-free packages: _all_ packages
have to provide the complete license in /usr/doc/<package>/copyright. The
only exception to this rule are licenses which are installed in the `base'
system: GPL, LGPL, Artistic, BSD.

The policy is very clear here:

----------------
5.6 Copyright information 

The file /usr/doc/package/copyright must contain details of the authorship
and copyright of the package. It must say where the upstream sources (if
any) were obtained, and explain briefly what modifications were made in
the Debian version of the package compared to the upstream one. It must
name the original authors of the package and the Debian maintainer(s) who
were involved with its creation. 

It must contain the full text of the copyright notice and any
acknowledgements for the program and the licence terms under which the
program is distributed. If the package is distributed under the GNU
General Public Licence, the GNU Library General Public Licence, the
Regents of the University of California at Berkeley (BSD) licence or Larry
Wall's Artistic Licence please say so instead of including a copy of the
licence. The files BSD, GPL.gz, LGPL.gz and Artistic.gz are be available
in /usr/doc/copyright for you to refer to. 
----------------

So feel free to report bugs against all packages that don't have a full
license in the copyright file. (You can send maint-only releases for
simplicity.)



Thanks,

Chris

--                 Christian Schwarz
                    schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Don't know Perl?     schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
      
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http://www.perl.com     http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/


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