Summary of requirements of various licenses for the reproduction of copyright notices

The goal of this page it determine for a list of common licenses whether they require to reproduce copyright statements in the Debian source and binary packages. Discussion for each license is held on the DebianLegal mailing list and was started the first of July 2009.

This work starts with three examples: the WTFPL, that does not require anything about the copyrights, and the GPL, that does not have special requirements for binary distributions since they are always accompanied with their sources, and the Expat license, that requires to reproduce copyright statements in all substantial parts of the work.

The following table lists license, indicates if they require to reproduce copyright statements in binary or source distributions, and includes a column to hold links to relevant discussions on DebianLegal or elsewhere.

License

Binary

Source

Links

Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License

No

No

GNU General Public License

No

Yes

Expat License

Yes

Yes

Buena Onda License

No

No

Boost Software License

No

Yes

Berkeley software distribution License

Yes

Yes

NetBSD Foundation License

Yes

Yes

FreeBSD Project License

Yes

Yes

Internet Software Consortium license

?

Yes

1

Artistic License version 1

No

Yes

It may be possible to generalise the problem, as some other license have similar requirements, but about the reproduction of other statements. For instance, the Apache licence version 2.0 has requirements about “NOTICE” files or their contents…


The wiki page is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 Universal license version 1.0 or (at your option) superior.