[aur-general] AUR & Copyright

[Xyne]

Eric Waller wrote:

> I am not a lawyer and I generally tune out all license flame wars.
> That said, PKGBUILDS generally do not contain copyright or license
> declarations.  Unless I am mistaken, that means someone who comes into
> possession of a PKGBUILD does not have the right to republish it.
> 
> As a minimum, I think Arch should get a nod from the creator of a
> PKGBUILD prior to absorbing it into the colective -- It might help
> avoid any misunderstandings.

What is the legal status of files submitted to the AUR? I have always assumed
that anything uploaded to the AUR is automatically licensed under the GPL or
something similar, in the same way that content contributed to the wiki is.

I can't find anything that states this on the AUR site, which is a potentially
calamitous legal oversight.

The legal issue should be cleared up. If we needed to obtain explicit
permission from every contributor then the AUR would cease to be useful. You
would not be able to adopt and update PKGBUILDs without permission, and you
would need to enable users to delete their own PKGBUILDs when they decide to
withdraw permission.