[aur-general] AUR & Copyright

[Thomas S Hatch]

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 1:10 PM, Bernardo Barros
<bernardobarros2 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2011/2/6 Xyne <xyne at archlinux.ca>:
> > 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.
>
> Ownership and authorship aren't the same. In the first place the GPL
> lisence requires the copyright notice to exist. It is actually based
> on authorship, the first line is a copyright notice. And there is
> nothing bad about it.
>
> Anyway atributing the work is a good thing. Good people atributive the
> works of their friends. Of course, if you revise the code in a not
> superficial way you also have some authorship in that piece of code,
> then it's a team work.
>
> Or... you can interpret that the buildscript are Public Domain, then
> Arch, TU, IBM, Apple  etc., all can use it without atributing
> anything. But since it is only useful for Arch users in the end... it
> is the same thing in practice.
>


Realy I think that this is a simple thing, that we should just post some
statement that says that anything uploaded to the AUR can be absorbed into
the Arch Linux distribution. When PKGBUILDS are in the AUR I could care less
who's they are, but they are Arch Linux's when they are moved to
community/extra/core.
So my initial thought would be that the submit page just needs to say - in
effect - "Dude, we can move your package into the main distribution whenever
we want to and it will be assimilated, this should be cool with you, because
Arch is the best"