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Subject: Re: Licence required in javadoc output?
From: Simon Kitching <skitching@apache.org>
Reply-To: skitching@apache.org
To: legal-discuss@apache.org
Cc: pmc@jakarta.apache.org
In-Reply-To: <20050120074746.P82879@bez.hyperreal.org>
References: 
	 <OF094ACE50.B6B6FCA2-ON05256F8E.0050E896-05256F8E.00519AD6@us.ibm.com>
	 <20050120074746.P82879@bez.hyperreal.org>
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Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2005 01:02:30 +1300
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On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 07:58 -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Jeffrey Thompson wrote:
> > Interesting question.  First, a perspective point.  The copyright notice in
> > the file is primarily for Apache's benefit.  It puts people on notice that
> > Apache claims copyright on the material.
> 
> Well, first, it really should be:
> 
>   Copyright [yyyy] The Apache Software Foundation or its licensors, as
>   applicable.
> 
> The board has been lax in asking the developers to adopt this new 
> attribution, which is much more appropriate than just saying "Copyright 
> The Apache Software Foundation"; the original contributions remain owned 
> by their contributors, we're simply granted a right to redistribute; we do 
> have a compilation copyright though, as I understand it.
> 
> > On the other hand, the license (though it does have some benefit to Apache)
> > is primarily for the user's benefit.  Without it, the user has no license
> > at all.
> >
> > So, is the user put at a disadvantage in any way because the license isn't
> > embedded in the JavaDoc?  Wouldn't anyone who understands how JavaDoc works
> > know exactly how to find out what license is available for that material?
> 
> My sense is that this is splitting hairs a bit and that the full license, 
> or even the reference to it, doesn't need to be included in the javadoc 
> output - just as we don't embed it as a string in compiled code when we 
> distribute binaries.  Would someone reasonably be able to claim that they 
> didn't know there was a copyright on that file simply because we didn't 
> put a notice in it?  My guess is probably not, or if so, no big deal.

This thread
http://mail-archives.eu.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200501.mbox/index.html
with subject: "Licence required in Javadoc output?" was about whether
the Apache licence needed to be included in every page of javadoc output
for jakarta-commons projects (and digester in particular). As shown
above, the general conclusion seemed to be that it was not.

However I have just noticed that this page
  http://www.apache.org/dev/apply-license.html
has the text

<quote>
Should the license be included in source files for documentation (e.g.
XML that is transformed to HTML)?

Yes. All source files should include the copyright notice boilerplate
that indicates it is owned by the ASF and that it is distributed under
the Apache License, Version 2.0. 
</quote>

Can someone clarify that "source file" is meant to refer to the original
file rather than derived files (in the example, the XML rather than the
generated HTML output)? Or make an exception for files that are
well-known to be derived files (such as javadoc pages)?


I also notice that the footer for this very web page has a *reference*
to the apache license rather than either 
a) nothing (which was the general conclusion of the email thread above),
or
b) the full license text.

Actually, for my purposes (javadoc generation) having a reference to the
license as is done in this page would also be acceptable (just not the
*full* licence present in each page as is currently done).


Yours in confusion,

Simon


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