[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Specifying a copyright in package files while being licensed under GPL-2.0-only

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On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 9:26 AM Pavol Sloboda via legal
<legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have recently been looking into the CMake files of the galera package and I have found this line in multiple of the files:
> # Copyright (C) 2020 Codership Oy <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> and after searching the fedora packaging guidelines for whether specifying a copyright while the whole package is licensed under GPL-2.0-only is an issue I have found nothing on the matter.
> So my questions are: Is this an issue? And are cases like this documented somewhere in the packaging guidelines?

The issue you're raising is that the source files generally have a
copyright notice but no license notice, but I'd say it's pretty clear
that these source files are covered by GPLv2 given the global LICENSE
and COPYING files and the statement about GPLv2 licensing in the
README. Some would say what they've done (that is, bothering to put a
copyright notice in individual source files but *not* bothering to
also include a license notice) is a bad practice but it's not entirely
unusual. You could imagine other situations with different details
where it might be an issue.

Richard

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