please clarify/document who holds copyright

[jcfp]

There's a gpl-3 license text included (good!), but the copyright holder and year(s) aren't explicitly mentioned anywhere in the source code (except for some code snippets based on a US government project). The windows installer file appears to name a 'GPXSee project' as the copyright holder, while source code here on github seems to be almost exclusively the work of tumic0 (aka Martin Tůma). Meanwhile, copyright years are missing entirely. Please clarify.

Related wishlist: add license headers in all relevant source files.

[tumic0]

The author of all the code (with exception of the few projection files that were originally based on libgeotrans) is indeed me - Martin Tůma. There is however some other stuff, where I'm not the author:

1. The localization files (various authors)
2. The datum/ellipsoid/pcs csv files which are originally based on gdal data with a MIT style license

The reason why there is "GPXSee project" in the windows installer is mainly to "include" the people doing the localization.

I'm not a big fan of decorating all the source files with the same license text. The license (GPL3) is the same for all of the files and is included in the repository, this should be IMHO enough. The info about 1.) and 2.) is however missing, that's true. I will add it somewhere when I get some time.

[jcfp]

Thanks for your reply. Reason I asked is that Debian requires maintainers to document a package's copyright in great detail. New packages get an especially close look, with copyright issue unfortunately a very common rejection ground. Hence the need to clear this up beforehand.

If the translators didn't sign over or otherwise donated their copyright, they'd indeed need to be recognized for their work.

For the gdal data, info on the copyright holder(s) and the license text itself must be included in GPXSee releases, as the MIT license requires that the [...] copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And last but not least: don't forget to mention yourself as a copyright holder. I'll put the Debian work on hold for now, pending these changes.

[tumic0]

So the final CSV data format in the 5.x line is now set. The current data is compilation of various public sources. For the GCS and particularly the PCS data the GDAL files were also used, but as the origin is rather the EPSG database and not GDAL itself, it is questionable whom and how to credit for the data...

The origin of all other stuff is pretty clear. The localization contributions can be easily traced here on GitHub, the sources are mine, with the exception of the one (documented) based on libgeotrans.

Therefore I'm closing this issue. If you are not satisfied, than simply do not include GPXSee into Debian. After two attempts that ended in endless bureaucracy and/or broken stuff (doing the RFP with reportbug that crashes every time one wants to submit a bug report was extra funny), I surrender. In contrast to other mainstream distros, Debian users will have to use extra repositories for GPXSee, but anyone using Debian on the Desktop must be used to such obstacles anyway.