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thaljef / Pinto

Curate your own repository of Perl modules
https://metacpan.org/module/Pinto::Manual
66 stars 49 forks source link

etc/ folder. Missing copyright statement and license information in the source. #104

Closed gashev closed 11 years ago

gashev commented 11 years ago

Hi,

While packaging your module for Debian, I noticed that it doesn't seem to mention copyright and license information.

Copyright/license information is needed in order for us (and others) to be able to legally distribute the software. Could you please give us (replying to this bug report is fine): years of copyright, copyright holders' names, copyright holders' e-mail addresses (if appropriate).

This is more than just a Debian issue. I'm not a lawyer, but it's my understanding that both copyright and licensing information is vital for the continued success of open source software. Copyright is what allows you to assert a license, and a license is what gives others the rights to use and re-distribute your software. A great article discussing some of this is "What is Copyleft?" by Richard Stallman: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/

Thanks for releasing your work to the CPAN. I apologize in advance for the noise, as I understand that the last thing most authors want to deal with is legal administrivia like this. I do hope, however, that you could (in your continued generosity) help us with this request. Please also consider adding these statements to your code/package README, since we must distribute some evidence of copyright information if it is not in the source package itself.

Cheers,

Oleg Gashev On behalf of the Debian Perl Team

thaljef commented 11 years ago

Hi Oleg-

All the releases to CPAN include a LICENSE file just like this one:

https://metacpan.org/source/THALJEF/Pinto-0.087/LICENSE

That file is generated when the release package is made, so you won't see it in the GitHub repository. All the released modules also include a copyright statement. But this too is only inserted when the release is packaged for CPAN.

The files in etc/ are probably not getting the copyright statement, and so I will fix that. But is the LICENSE file otherwise adequate? Do you need something more than that?

Thanks for all the work you do. I always get a kick from seeing my CPAN modules in dpkg listing.

-Jeff

gashev commented 11 years ago

Please add copyright statement to the files in etc/ folder. I'll reopen this issue if you need to add license information to files in etc/ folder.

Thanks.

Oleg.

thaljef commented 11 years ago

All files in the etc directory now have a copyright declaration. In theory, all the files are also covered by the LICENSE file that is included with the distribution. Although there is no explicit mention of that in those files.

Please reopen this issue if you need additional stuff to make this code legitimate for Debian. Thanks!

polettix commented 11 years ago

Hello Jeffrey,

you might have forgotten to switch back to the 'master' branch

before doing the last updates to the files in the etc/ folder.

If it was actually a mistake and you're using a terminal, consider installing git-prompt.sh (https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/git-prompt.sh) to always know which branch you're in ;-)

Ciao,

Flavio.
thaljef commented 11 years ago

you might have forgotten to switch back to the 'master' branch before doing the last updates to the files in the etc/ folder.

Yeah, that was my mistake. I do have a prompt that displays the git branch. But I still manage to ignore it some times. I'll move these commits over to master. Not sure if cherry picking is going to make the merge harder down the road.