Determining unnecessary notices from Airavata distribution

[Suresh Marru <sm...@iu.edu>]

Hi,

During a recent release, we had the following comments on Airavata binary notice file [1] and the corresponding license file [2]. Based on Ate's comments we removed the extra NOTICEs for SLF4J, DOM4J, ICU4J and few others. But can some one please look at the NOTICE file [1] and comments below and suggest examples on what still is unnecessary and removed?   

On Apr 25, 2012, at 4:35 PM, Ate Douma wrote:

> * binary NOTICE file
> - I think there are some unneeded/unwanted entries still. Some notices and copyright statements should not legally be needed nor are they requested.
> For instance for BSD/MIT like licenses which already are provided for verbatim in the LICENSE file itself, there is no need to (and thus should not) be covered *also* in the NOTICE file. Having those in the LICENSE file should be enough. And certainly so if the 3rd party artifact doesn't have or require an explicit NOTICE file itself. I think this applies to the NOTICE entries for SLF4J, DOM4J, ICU4J, Jettison, etc. Please do check if each of these notices really are necessary/required.
> 
> - A different thing is the NOTICE provided for commons-logging (1.1.1).
> The commons-logging jar come with a NOTICE file of its own (being an ASF release it should). But IMO the additional content copied verbatim from that NOTICE file can be ignored and thus removed. It concerns the following section:
> 
>  This product includes/uses software(s) developed by 'an unknown organization'
>  - Unnamed - avalon-framework:avalon-framework:jar:4.1.3
>  - Unnamed - log4j:log4j:jar:1.2.12
>  - Unnamed - logkit:logkit:jar:1.0.1
> 
> Only log4j is actually bundled with airavata and as an ASF artifact doesn't need extra NOTICE coverage. And as the other referenced artifacts aren't included or used there is no need to 'honor' this part from the common-logging NOTICE file.
> The ASL 2.0 license sections 4.d) says: "[...], excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works."

On May 1, 2012, at 11:18 AM, sebb wrote:

> The NOTICE file in the binary archive contains the following:
> 
> =========================================================================
> ==  NOTICE file corresponding to section 4(d) of the Apache License,   ==
> ==  Version 2.0, in this case for the Apache Airavata distribution.    ==
> =========================================================================
> 
> This definitely should not be present.
> 
> There are lots of other entries in the NOTICE file; it's not clear to
> me whether they are all needed or not.
> AIUI, the NOTICE file should only contain *required* notices (whereas
> the LICENSE file should contain ALL applicable licenses)

Thank you in advance for the guidance,
Suresh

[1] - https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/airavata/trunk/modules/distribution/src/main/resources/NOTICE