[jira] [Created] (LEGAL-640) License Inheritence from Parent Poms

["Gus Heck (Jira)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Gus Heck created LEGAL-640:
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             Summary: License Inheritence from Parent Poms
                 Key: LEGAL-640
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-640
             Project: Legal Discuss
          Issue Type: Question
            Reporter: Gus Heck


I've discovered I don't understand something about how licensing works with respect to Parent Poms. There are 4 possible situations between a pom and it's parent...
 # Neither declares a license
 # The child declares a license but the parent does not
 # The parent declares a license but the child does not
 # Both parent and child declare licenses

The first three are straight forward I think, parent poms are meant to collect common information so in case 3 it seems reasonable to consider this the license for the child.

However in case 4 where the parent and child declarations are not identical I don't know how to interpret this. (For example asm-util-9.2 which has BSD 3 clause in it's pom and ASL 2.0 in the parent)  There seem to be two possible interpretations
 # The project is available under the users choice among the Union of parent and child licenses
 # The child license declaration supplants and erases the parent license declaration and the project is only available under the licenses defined in the child pom 

Disclaimer: I am not directly facing this problem on either of the projects I am currently PMC for (Lucene & Solr), but I did run into it working on a project that might possibly apply to be an Apache project in the future (and thus attempts to follow https://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html). I'm asking this question here on the basis that having the knowledge would be beneficial for ensuring that the projects I am PMC on don't make mistakes, but if this is too thin of a justification to merit a question here please just close this.

For full disclosure, the potential future project is JesterJ and investigations lead me to report and debug [an issue|https://github.com/jk1/Gradle-License-Report/issues/264] in a tool used there, only to discover that once I knew where the surprising license actually came from, I didn't know if it was actually a bug. So effectively I've found a gap in my knowledge and want to know what to do if I find this type of issue in one of the projects I am PMC for.



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