Subject: Re: Is Debian itself *really* freely redistributable?

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 96 13:23 PDT

From: Mike Coleman <[email-masked]>
> It seems to me, though, that the Debian packages themselves (e.g., *.deb)
> files are derivatives that the package maintainers hold a (so far implicit)
> copyright on.

We publish a copyright statement with each Debian package. In each package,
we have honored the copyright of the original author and we have placed
the entire package under that copyright, including the Debian modifications.

We can not, and will not, stop anyone who wants to distribute Debian from
doing so.

	Bruce
--
Pixar's Toy Story: Over 1/3 Billion dollars world box office so far.

Bruce Perens AB6YM          [email-masked]            http://www.hams.com/

---

From: Mike Coleman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 96 16:30 CDT

Date: Sun, 2 Jun 96 13:23 PDT
   From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)

I'm assuming that you're talking about /usr/doc/copyright here.  I'm not a
lawyer, but for most of the packages, it doesn't look like anything at all is
being said about the copyright on Debian modifications.

To take an example, the copyright for electric-fence, which you wrote,
says nothing about the copyright Siggy, the current package maintainer, holds
on his modifications.

This does seem like fine hairsplitting; if no one else sees this as a problem,
I'll not worry about it either.

--Mike