Re: LiDIA's statement of GPL only in mailing list archives (original) (raw)

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, Florian Weimer wrote:

the part of the message that has all that information, along with that message's 'date', 'from', 'message-id' fields.

Yeah; bonus points if the message is GPG signed by a key which is in and multiply connected to strongly connected set.

Yeah, as if this made it a particularly authoritative source for any kind of legal statement. 8-)

Short of having a notarized signed statement, it's the best we can do; while there are obviously methods of exploiting it, it's clearly better than just an e-mail. Most importantly, it allows us to have a reasonable belief that the copyright holder has actually ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ licensed us to distribute the work.

Huh? Why do you think so?

In most cases, the difficult question is not whether the statement was made by the purported author, but whether the author is entitled to make that statement on behalf of the actual copyright owner.

You'll note that in no case did Ben Finney or myself talk about "author"; we instead use "copyright holder" for precisely this reason.

Whoever the copyright holder is (or their legal representative) needs to notify the package maintainer or Debian of the license on the code, ideally in some sort of manner that clearly comes from the copyright holder.

Don Armstrong

-- One day I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time. -- Steven Wright

http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu

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