You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to dev@jmeter.apache.org by sebb <se...@gmail.com> on 2013/07/14 13:29:26 UTC

NOTICE and LICENSE issues

[This is embarrassing...]

The NOTICE and LICENSE files need some major adjustments.

The NOTICE & LICENSE files should only relate to the bits that are
actually included in the relevant archive [2]
So for example the source archive should contain N&L files that relate
just to the source (and any image) files.

AFAIK the only 3rd party items actually contained in the source
release are the icons - all the jars are now only included in the
binary archive.

The binary archive needs to contain the licenses for all the 3rd party jars.
Its NOTICE file may also need to be different.

I think the problem arises from the fact that the 3rd party jars used
to be included in SVN.
When the jars were removed from SVN it looks like we forgot to adjust
the N&L files.
And subsequent additions of run-time dependencies have just followed
the existing pattern.

Also there have been clarifications to the ASF documentation [1] on
the NOTICE & LICENSE files.
In particular, it now looks as though copyright notices generally do
not need to be copied
from the license file to the notice file. This should simplify the
binary NOTICE file considerably.

==

As part of this process, I think it would make sense to split the
LICENSE file up into individual licenses.
I think it will be easier to maintain the licenses if they are each in
a separate file.
If each license file name includes the product name and version it
will be easy to relate the license to the jar.
For example, the JUnit license file could be in licenses/junit-4.11.txt
The main LICENSE file should contain a pointer to the licenses directory.

Most of the Maven jars contain only compiled JMeter source so their
N&L files are OK.
However there are 3rd party icons in at least one of them -
ApacheJMeter_core.jar.
The N&L files for this jar may need adjusting, possibly the POM too.

Having identified this, I think we need to address the issue before
the next release.
I'll make a start on this shortly.

[1] http://www.apache.org/dev/licensing-howto.html#mod-notice
[2] http://www.apache.org/dev/licensing-howto.html#bundled-vs-non-bundled