Bug#698019: libav: the effective GPL-licensed status of the binary packages should be clearly documented

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 02:41:07PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> the current defined purpose of the copyright file apparently is only to
> cover copyrights and licensing or _source_.

That's not true.  The purpose of the copyright file has *always* been to
ensure that the license for a given binary package is correctly documented
in that package.  It's just that the safest way to ensure this is by
documenting the entire license for the source package in debian/copyright
and copying that file to each of the binary packages.  Unfortunately we took
a wrong turn somewhere and started considering debian/copyright itself the
requirement, and that's a *bug*.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org