[Openmcl-devel] copyright/license file for Debian

[Gary Byers]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2012, Faheem Mitha wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> Per http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/ I've got to write a copyright file, The 
> beginning paras currently look as follows. This will be followed by more 
> details.
>
> #########################################################################
> Format: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
> Upstream-Name: Clozure Common Lisp
> Upstream-Contact: Mailing list for discussion of OpenMCL development issues 
> <openmcl-devel at clozure.com>
> Source: http://ccl.clozure.com/download.html
>
> Files: *
> Copyright: 1994-2003 Digitool, Inc

Digitool doesn't exist anymore.  Digitool's copyright interest in CCL was
transferred to Clozure, and all source files that contain a Digitool copyright
notice should also contain a more recent Clozure notice.

Some files that're part of CCL contain code contributed by users.  On some
platforms, some freely-redistributable header files are used to build the
lisp kernel (but AFAIK this isn't true of x8632 Linux.)

Saying that the code is copyright 1994-2012 by Clozure Associates and contributors
ls probably as accurate as anything.

> License: LLGPL
> #########################################################################
>
> I'd like to ask if this looks ok, and in particular, what should the 
> Copyright field look like? I'm not sure. I copied this from somewhere. 
> Presumably it should also have Clozure Associates in it.
>
> I'm also thinking of adding an
>
> Upstream Authors:
>
> field. Currently I have
>
> Upstream Authors: Gary Byers <openmcl-devel at clozure.com> and Digitool, Inc

Lots of people (inside and outside of Clozure) have worked on CCL.  Saying
that the authors are "Clozure Associates and contributors" is more accurate
and preferable.

This mailing list is subscribers-only (anyone who wants to can subscribe
to it, but you have to be be a subscriber in order to send mail to the list;
this seems to be fairly effective in discouraging spam.

If a non-subscriber sends mail to the list (or if a subscriber sends mail
from an email address other than the one from which they subscribed), the
mail gets "held for approval" by the mailing list software, and some poor
loser has to manually go through the list of held messages to approve the
non-spam.  Since I'm the poor loser in question, I'm not really enthused
about having non-subscribers send mail to openmcl-devel.  If you can use
a URL instead of an email address, then "http://ccl.clozure.com" would be
a better choice.

As I read

<http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/#upstream-contact-field>

a URI can be used in the optional Upstream-Contact field.

>
> What should this look like? Thanks in advance.
>
>                                                           Regards, Faheem
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>
>