| Subject: | Missing Copyright Information |
Hi:
While packaging your module for Debian, I noticed that it doesn't seem
to mention copyright for the package as a whole. Some individual files
do have copyright details, but none cover the entire distribution. There
should be something in a LICENSE file or in the main Dancer.pm POD
indicating the default copyright holder of files in the package where
none is explicitly specified. I did note that the Dancer.pm does mention
the package is licensed under the same terms as Perl, which is nice.
In Debian we need copyright/license information for all of the packages
we upload. Could you give us (replying to this bug report is fine):
years of copyright, copyright holders' names, copyright holders' e-mail
addresses. Unfortunately without this information we cannot upload it.
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 ensures open source
remains open source, and that users can make use of 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,
Jonathan
On behalf of the Debian Perl Team