| Subject: | Missing copyright information |
Hi:
While upgrading your module for Debian, I noticed that it doesn't seem
to mention copyright information. I also spotted that, while an
acknowledgement is present in the README, there's no mention of the
copyright or license terms for the included m51.fits.gz file.
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,
Chris Butler
On behalf of the Debian Perl Team