Arch Linux

obarun

Member

Registered: 2015-07-22

Posts: 11

Website

Licenses about Original PKGBUILD

Hello,

I'm a simple person that try to keep Archlinux without systemd. To do this i need to rebuild some packages.
I would like to share my work.
So my question is very simple : If i give the original author on the PKGBUILD, can i put me as maintainer of this modified package? No problem of license doing this?

This is an example of my PKGBUILD about lvm2

# Maintainer: Eric Vidal <eric@obarun-linux.zz.mu>
# based on the    original https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit … kages/lvm2
#                         Maintainer: Eric Bélanger <eric@archlinux.org>
#                         Maintainer: Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org>

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,324

Re: Licenses about Original PKGBUILD

IANAL, but I would say yes.  At least for any of the GPL, BSD, Apache, and other Licences associated with Free or other Open Source projects.   In other words, licences that grant you the right to modify and redistribute

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Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,330

Website

Re: Licenses about Original PKGBUILD

The general habit is to keep everyone who was there before but change it from "maintainer" to "contributor".  As far as licensing - that's a very good question to ask, but I don't think you need be concerned.  The software you are packaging has important licenses, but the PKGBUILD itself has no declared license.  In most areas this would mean there is an implicit copyright and one couldn't modify it at all.  But PKGBUILDs are so short, simple, and common* that copyright laws almost certainly couldn't even apply (but I'm no lawyer).  I do know that the de-facto standard is that PKGBUILDs are all treated essentially as public domain.  It is simply courteous to keep acknowledgement of anyone who worked on it before you.

* common isn't quite the right word here, but the right word isn't coming to mind.  Essentially as the format is predefined there are only limited numbers of ways to write a PKGBUILD correctly.  So when one writes one there may not be a significantly substantial novel intellectual content to be protected.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

obarun

Member

Registered: 2015-07-22

Posts: 11

Website

Re: Licenses about Original PKGBUILD

thanks for your quick reply.

So if i understand correctly, no problem. i will change maintainer to contributor, you're right, i just modified the package nothing important just what's needed to work without systemd.

thank again