Copyright notice, licensing conditions, and info files status in JED

Rafael Laboissiere rafael at debian.org
Mon Jan 22 23:29:15 CET 2007


Hi John,

I reviewing the JED packages in Debian, we noticed that the following files
are lacking copyright notices and licensing conditions:

    src/colors.h
    src/config.h
    src/dfasyntx.c
    src/dfasyntx.h
    src/jedlimit.h
    src/menu.h
    src/sysconf.h
    src/win32.h
    doc/manual/jed.tex
    lib/*.sl

According to the text of the GPL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC4),
copyright notices and licensing conditions should be attached to the start
of each source file.  This is currently required for new packages added to
Debian (the JED packages were approved long ago, when the acceptance
conditions were not so rigid).

Another issue regards the info files distributed in the JED tarball.  At the
top of them we see:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
File: jed.info,  Node: Top,  Next: Introduction,  Up: (dir)

   Note!!! This document is nolonger maintained.  See jed/doc/*.txt
   for more current documentation.

   Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 John E. Davis
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

There are several problems with this info documentation: (1) It is old. 
(2) It is no longer maintained.  (3) Up-to-date docs are (apparently)
provided elsewhere.  (4) The texinfo source is not available.  (5) We do not
know its exact licensing terms.

Points (4) and (5) are infringements to the Debian standards (see the DFSG,
http://www.debian.org/social_contract).  We are, for now, striping the info
files from the Debian packages, but would like to put them back, provided
that you clarify the points (4) and (5) above.

Cheers,

-- 
Rafael



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