[aur-general] AUR & Copyright

[Ray Rashif]

On 7 February 2011 07:21, Xyne <xyne at archlinux.ca> wrote:
> Ray Rashif wrote:
>
>> Sorry, bad comparison, then. I'm not really sure what to compare it
>> with. We've never had to talk about things like this before (so
>> probably the time has come you would say). First of all, we've never
>> had people claiming "rights" to PKGBUILDs.
>
> I agree that it is unlikely to be a problem, but the best thing to do is
> deal with the eventuality rather than continue with naive optimism.
>
> What needs to be done, imo:
> * decide on a permissive license or public domain for submitted files
> * add a clearly visible notification
> * add a note concerning the submission of files that cannot be redistributed,
>  e.g. a copyrighted icon included in the upload
> * hope that no previous author ever shows up to claim copyright before the
>  addition of the notice

Here is what Gentoo does for all their official ebuilds [1]:

# Copyright 1999-2011 Gentoo Foundation
# Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2

This also appears in all third-party ebuilds [2], so I would assume
one written by an individual and distributed by itself would contain
this same license note.

In order for something like this to work for Arch, aside from official
and third-party repositories, the AUR needs to (1) reject PKGBUILDs
without the license header, (2) inject the header to every submitted
PKGBUILD, or (3) display a note and assume contributors will take the
initiative. None of those appeal to me, personally, but as far as this
subject is concerned I abstain :)

[1] http://gentoo-portage.com/
[2] http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/List_of_overlays