Chapter 2. The Debian Archive

8

2.3 Copyright considerations

Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright and distribution

license in the file

/usr/share/doc/

package

/copyright

(see `Copyright information' on

page

101

for further details).

We reserve the right to restrict files from being included anywhere in our archives if

  their use or distribution would break a law,

  there is an ethical conflict in their distribution or use,

  we would have to sign a license for them, or

  their distribution would conflict with other project policies.

Programs whose authors encourage the user to make donations are fine for the main distribu 

tion, provided that the authors do not claim that not donating is immoral, unethical, illegal or

something similar; in such a case they must go in non free.

Packages whose copyright permission notices (or patent problems) do not even allow redistri 

bution of binaries only, and where no special permission has been obtained, must not be placed

on the Debian FTP site and its mirrors at all.

Note that under international copyright law (this applies in the United States, too), no distri 

bution or modification of a work is allowed without an explicit notice saying so. Therefore a

program without a copyright notice is copyrighted and you may not do anything to it without

risking being sued! Likewise if a program has a copyright notice but no statement saying what

is permitted then nothing is permitted.

Many authors are unaware of the problems that restrictive copyrights (or lack of copyright

notices) can cause for the users of their supposedly free software. It is often worthwhile con 

tacting such authors diplomatically to ask them to modify their license terms. However, this

can be a politically difficult thing to do and you should ask for advice on the

debian legal

mailing list first, as explained below.

When in doubt about a copyright, send mail to

. Be

prepared to provide us with the copyright statement. Software covered by the GPL, public

domain software and BSD like copyrights are safe; be wary of the phrases  commercial use

prohibited  and  distribution restricted .

2.4 Subsections

The packages in the sections main, contrib and non free are grouped further into subsections to

simplify handling.

The section and subsection for each package should be specified in the package's

Section

control record (see `

Section

' on page

31

). However, the maintainer of the Debian archive

may override this selection to ensure the consistency of the Debian distribution. The

Section

field should be of the form:

  subsection if the package is in the main section,

  section/subsection if the package is in the contrib or non free section, and