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 |
No |
No |
|
|
No |
Yes |
|
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
No |
No |
|
|
No |
Yes |
|
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
|
? |
Yes |
||
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.