Request: Please remove my VMACS repository from the Gentoo user overlay (originally opened under bug #508900). Reason: All packages I posted to the overlay were freely available elsewhere. Typically they were newer versions of several of the same packages available on the main Gentoo trees. However, I do not feel comfortable having to sign off on copyrights (since they are not my packages and I do not have contact with the authors) to post these updated ebuilds to your server so I will no longer be using nor updating the repo from Gentoo's servers. Reproducible: Always
FTR, copyright sign-off is about your code, i.e. ebuilds only. Upstream copyrights are completely irrelevant here.
Thank you for the clarification. In most cases, the contents of the ebuilds in my repository are exact copies of the main Gentoo tree version but the filename is renamed to the new version of the software. I have, in some cases, additionally un/set the stable flag for keywords or rarely, I may update the download source if necessary. Aside from that, I have almost never found a need to edit your ebuilds with the packages I have in my repository. Given the information you have shared, please clarify if you are stating that my usage as I have described would fall under the GLEP 76 Certificate of Origin guidelines https://www.gentoo.org/glep/glep-0076.html. If so, I would like to withdraw my request to remove my repository from the overlay.
That falls entirely under point 2., i.e. you're taking our code (which we give you as GPL-2) and modifying it. That's entirely fine. It should be also fine to take ebuilds from other sources as long as they have valid GPL-2 header (or some other free license).
Perfect. Thanks for the clarifications; with the new understanding, I will go ahead and keep the repository. I appreciate you taking the time to clear this up for me.
No problem.