This package was first debianized by Paul Haggart on Sun, 27 Apr 1997 15:09:37 -0400. It was downloaded from: http://www.mpg123.de/download/ Upstream authors: Michael Hipp Oliver Fromme Thomas Orgis Nicholas J Humfrey Copyright: (c) 1995-2006 by the mpg123 project (Michael Hipp, Oliver Fromme, Thomas Orgis, Nicholas J Humfrey, and contributors) "free software under the terms of the LGPL 2.1" The following clarification is taken verbatim from the file COPYING in the source distribution: Code is copyrighted by Michael Hipp, who made it free software under the terms of the LGPL 2.1. But that is not all of it. mpg123 is licensed under the GNU General Lesser Public License, version 2.1, and in parts under the GNU General Public License, version 2. That means that _all_ of mpg123 is licensed under GPL and the major part also under the LGPL. Actually, the "major part" currently is the whole distributed package of mpg123. There are some files (old alsa output, libao output) that you get from our svn repository and that do not fall under LGPL. When the copyright marker in a source file says "the mpg123 project" that means that the file contains code copyrighted by contributors to mpg123, the "initially written by" naming the person(s) that created the file and thus may have the largest part of copyrights on it. I am explaining this here to emphasize that the copyright always actually lies by the individual member (i.e. contributor to) of the mpg123 project who wrote a specific section of code. Usage of a source code management system like Subversion should provide keeping track of individual copyright traces... Please consider that any code that is contributed to the mpg123 project shall be licensed under LGPL 2.1 . If you want to contribute, but don't agree to that (i.e. you want to have your code GPL only) please say so - then, we either you convince is to include your code under GPL, we convince you to make it LGPL instead or, as a last resort, you'll have to do you own GPLed fork. But we should try to avoid the last option... All files in the distribution that don't carry a license note on their own are licensed under the terms of the LGPL 2.1; all files that do carry either a LGPL or GPL note are licensed respectively under the LGPL or GPL as follows: (...) where the complete texts of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 have been omitted here for brevity. On any Debian GNU/Linux system, they can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2', and '/usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2.1', respectively. Earlier versions of mpg123 were distributed under a license that did not meet Debian's free software guidelines. Details on the relicensing process can be found in the file ROAD_TO_LGPL that is part of mpg123's source distribution. It is located in the 'doc' subdirectory.