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Somewhat recently there has been significant discussion within the project regarding the necessity of documenting copyright attribution in debian/copyright. The FTP team has reviewed the situation and takes the following position:

1. Most licenses require copyright statements to be included. In the FTP team's view, unless a license explicitly states that copyright attributions only apply to source distributions, they apply for source and binary, so must be documented in debian/copyright for license compliance reasons. An example of source only requirements can be found in the Apache 2.0 license, paragraph 4:

(c) You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works
that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and
attribution notices from the Source form of the Work,
excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of
the Derivative Works; and

The BSD (and similar) licenses are examples of licenses that require copyright attribution to be maintained for both source and binaries:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

GPL requires an "appropriate copyright notice" for both source and binary forms.

2. Additionally, it is currently required by policy:

2.3 Copyright considerations

Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
information and distribution license in the file
/usr/share/doc/package/copyright ...

3. In a few cases, FTP masters have determined that full copyright
attribution is both not feasible and, given the nature of the package, that an appropriate copyright notice does not need to list all copyright holders and allowed packages with an incomplete debian/copyright into the archive. Such a package still violates policy, although the FTP masters believe it to be a minor violation. Just because such a determination has been made about one package, does not mean it should apply to another package. Almost certainly the answer to requests for additional exceptions will be no.

4. The FTP team believes that documenting copyright holders in debian/copyright is a good idea. If policy were modified to make it along the lines of SHALL if the license does not explicitly allow it to be left out of binary distributions and SHOULD in all other cases, the FTP team believes this would be a good change make maintainer's efforts easier when a package license allows for it.

Scott K
For the FTP Team
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