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Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:37:01 +0000
Message-ID: <30b2aef60910271237o19bb6b85s5f20a0d766ad257f@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [VOTE] Release Wink 1.0
From: Leo Simons <mail@leosimons.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
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On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Bryant Luk <bryant.luk@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The source release has a LICENSE and a NOTICE file that indicates it
>> contains a bunch of stuff it does not actually contain. AFAICS it
>> should simply have a LICENSE that is just the Apache License and a
>> NOTICE file that has just our standard license header.
>
> I think you're suggesting a different LICENSE/NOTICE for source versus
> binary distributions.

Yep, I see how it looks like that....though maybe I'm _really_
suggesting a source-only distribution :-)

Look, the general rule is quite simple: LICENSE files MUST contain all
the license information that applies to an artifact, and SHOULD
contain only the license information that applies to that artifact.
Similarly, NOTICE files MUST contain all the notices that apply to an
artifact, and SHOULD contain only the notice information that applies
to that artifact.

Whenever you violate that SHOULD, you are turning lazyness/sloppiness
into a mess for your users.

For example, with this current wink distribution, you are (appear to
be?) passing on a lot of CDDL obligations down to wink users, which is
annoying to users that care about such things. If all your user wants
to do is copy/paste the glue code from GzipHandler, that's a rather
heavy license to wade through. Similarly, that user of that
GzipHandler code now has to copy/paste the entire contents of the
NOTICE file.

Do you really want to place a burden on your users like that?

>=A0I did some random checking looking at some
> source versus binary Apache project distributions (incubator and
> non-incubator) and as far as I can tell, they kept their same LICENSE
> and NOTICE files even though they were not re-distributing the
> dependency binaries in the source archive.
>
> Don't mean to say we should just follow the crowd, but I don't think
> this is standard practice unless another thread has a viewpoint on
> this.

Unfortunately, most apache projects are not as good at following
policies as they should be, and most engineers (including me! :-) )
are not nearly as good at applying legal rules and guidelines as they
should be.

http://www.apache.org/dev/release.html#license

"What Are The Requirements To Distribute Other Artifacts In Addition
To The Source Package?
...
Nothing in this section is meant to supersede the requirements defined
<here> and <here> that all releases be primarily based on a signed
source package."

>> The NOTICE file for the binary release should include only those
>> notices that are actually required by the included library
>> dependencies, and they should reproduce the exact text of those
>> notices. For example, the slf4j notice line should not be there since
>> slf4j does not require it.
>
> I see varying degrees of attribution to slf4j in other Apache
> (incubating and non-incubating) projects (some have none, some have a
> line). =A0The slf4j line was kept from the Wink 0.1 release. =A0IMHO, thi=
s
> is not a release blocker, but we can remove it in a future release if
> it is the right thing to do.

Fortunately we have quite a clear rule on this topic these days, so no
opinions are necessary:

http://www.apache.org/dev/release.html#notice-content

"What Content Is Appropriate For The NOTICE File?
...
Only mandatory information required by the product's software
licenses. Not suitable for normal documentation."

For background color, here's an earlier thread on this list (which is
where I learned about the existence of that clear rule):

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/200909.mbox/%3Cf=
767f0600909090615t6582bfd1m36e4d8abe1392b23@mail.gmail.com%3E


cheers,


Leo

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