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Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:45:27 -0700
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Subject: Re: AOO LICENSE/NOTICE files
From: Marvin Humphrey <marvin@rectangular.com>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
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On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Greg Stein <gstein@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 20, 2012 9:54 PM, "Rob Weir" <robweir@apache.org> wrote:

>> See, for example:
>> http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/incubator/ooo/trunk/main/LICENSE?view=markup
>
> Hunh? The Apache License, section 4(d) states these go into NOTICE.

First, a general response:

There has been considerable (interminable?) debate on this list and elsewhere
as to what goes in LICENSE and what goes in NOTICE.  Personally, I don't
really care how things get resolved; my main motivation in starting this
thread is that we avoid putting AOO through the wringer that we put Rave,
Kafka, etc. through, because what with all those binaries the cost of rolling
a release candidate for AOO is high.

So please, everyone... get it all out of your system now, and don't all of a
sudden decide that to -1 an AOO release candidate because in your opinion
something that was supposed to go in NOTICE ended up in LICENSE or vice versa
or whatever.

Now, to address the specifics:

Current fashion with regards to NOTICE seems to be that we put stuff there
like the advertising clause of a 4-clause BSD dependency, and that we do *not*
put stuff there like the the copyright notice on 2-clause or 3-clause BSD
or ALv2 unless some copyright holder has decided that they're (ahem) more
special than all our other contributors and demanded specific recognition (via
"copyright relocation") in NOTICE.  See LEGAL-62 and LEGAL-59 as apologia, and
the Apache HTTPD LICENSE/NOTICE files as canonical samples.

IMO, the LICENSE/NOTICE dichotomy debates are sound and fury signifying
little, so long as the following are true:

    * All code, either contributed to the ASF or bundled as a dependency, has
      proper provenance documentation.
    * All source code is clearly associated with the license the author
      contributed it under, typically via licenses or license headers embedded
      in individual source files, but sometimes via a local README as might be
      appropriate for a commentless format like JSON.
    * All primary and dependency code is utilized under licenses compatible
      with aggregate distribution under ALv2.

IANAL, but it seems to me that so long as we get individual source file
license tagging right, whether redundant licensing information ends up in
"LICENSE" or "NOTICE" is unlikely to be a determining factor in whether
somebody launches a lawsuit.

The AOO folks have got to be as sophisticated as any podling that has come
through the Incubator in recent memory with regards to licensing, and assuming
that we can trust the provenance tracking of Sun/Oracle, I'd say they've got
things covered:

    https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/IP_Clearance

It's a complicated project and it's good to provide review, but I'm not
inclined to hassle them much about LICENSE/NOTICE.  If anybody else is, let's
do it now, while the cost to the podling is comparatively low.

Marvin Humphrey

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