[Pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers] Re: Sourcecode with multiple licenses

[Justin Pryzby]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 10:48:55PM +0100, Paul van Tilburg wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am package libfacets-ruby[1] for the Debian/Ruby Extras maintainers
> team.  This package bundles of hundreds of small libraries useful as an
> extra for Ruby's standard library.  The authors have all agreed to the
> bundling, however not everything is under the Ruby license yet, but they
> are trying to work towards that.
> Meanwhile, most of the lib files are under the Ruby license (a dual-
> licensing of Ruby's own and the GPL), but not all.  I have read the
> thread about dual-licensing and other discussions on this list, however
> I am not sure what to put in the debian/copyright file.
Dual licensing is easy, just say "foo.c is published under both the
RUBY license and the GPL".  Multiple authors and licenses are more
complicated, just 'cause you have to find them all and there's
probably always one that you're missing..

> I am currently packaging facets 0.7.2, which I am mirroring myself until
> I get around to tracking the rework done by the Calibre project.  The
> upstream source is available at http://paul.luon.net/facets--0.7.2.tar.gz
> of which of most interest probably is the README file.
I just put the README at http://justinpryzby.com/tmp/README.facets

You'll want to list every copyright holder, and indicate on what files
they hold copyright, and the name of the associated license.

The best way of doing this depends on how the files are authors are
distributed.  Probably a 1st order approximation is one-author per
file, with some files being written by the same author, so a natural
representation is "The following files are written by AUTHOR1 [and
AUTHOR2]... and are published under the LICENSE: FILES".

Then you'll want to include the license text for each license used
(only once, preferably).

-- 
Clear skies,
Justin