[Tts-project] Is it allowed to change license statement? [Was: Requesting sponsorship for Catalan Festival support]

[Sergio Oller]

Dear all,

Sorry, I could not reply earlier.

2014-05-26 10:29 GMT+02:00 Thibaut Paumard <thibaut at debian.org>:
> Sorry to bump in, but am I understanding this correctly that Sergio is
> also upstream in this work? In this case, that's entirely his busyness
> to change or reword the copyright statement and the license (as long
> as his fellow upstream copyright holders agree, but that doesn't
> concern us).

Even though I am upstream of the file /festvox/upc_ca_ona_hts.scm,
this file is derived from the festvox suite, and I am not upstream of
festvox; so I cannot change the license statement.

I will revert in the next 24 hours all the changes in d/copyright to
provide the license verbatim as I did not mean to break debian policy.

Given that you have spent some time considering this case, I would
like however to give you some rationale to my change:  Given that
"CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY AND THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS WORK"
represent the same set of people and institutions than "THE COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS AND THE CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS WORK" (Carnegie Mellon is a
copyright holder and all copyright holders are contributors), from my
(unexperienced) point of view I thought I was not changing the license
terms. On the other hand, I was providing the opportunity (to myself
and others) to reuse the same license terms on files unrelated to
Carnegie Mellon, without having to rewrite them again on d/copyright.

I understand that license terms are important and that by rewording
the terms, I might have overseen some license issues (and also I have
definitely broken Debian Policy). I am sorry for that.

I believe that the benefits of the rewording (possible reuse by myself
and others) do not compensate the cost of this discussion (my
rewording has "wasted" a bit of your time, specially Paul's). Moreover
I understand that a mistake in my rewording could be problematic to
Debian, so I will gladly revert the changes as soon as I can.

Thanks for all the support and concern, specially to Paul who has been
very kind supervising my packaging, and to David and Thibaut for being
so clear and precise with the answers.

Best regards,

Sergio