Artifacts with License Notice Distribution Requirements and Maven the build tool

[Alan Painter <al...@gmail.com>]

Hi folks,

I've been searching the archives for information on how maven
addresses the licensing requirements of its contained artifacts but
haven't found an answer.

I'm referring to "maven" the build tool and not referring to the maven
central repository or any repository in particular.

Many artifacts assembled via maven (again, the tool and not the
repository) require that a license notice accompany the downloaded
artifact(s).

To this extent, one should be able to indicate in the POM of a
particular artifact that one (or more) license notices be retrieved
and delivered to the local repository at the same moment as the
artifact itself.

Please note that this should be the normal course of events for a
normal build goal (ex: mvn install) and not be some special goal,
because it should be mandatory on the retrieval of the artifact into
the local repository.

Furthermore, I would suggest that  retrieving the license file into
the local repository is not sufficient: an information line in the
normal build log should indicate the license (or group of licenses)
with a link to the license file recovered in the local repository.

I think that this is the requirement for maven, as a build tool, to
permit a POM to indicate the license requirement and to enforce that
license requirement (i.e. copying the license notice and making the
copy conspicuous to the receiver) as part of a standard build.

If you've gotten this far, then I have two questions:

(a) Does maven allow this today?  (And, please, don't mention any
maven license plugins -- it must be part of the box standard build)

(b) If not possible, don't you agree that this is the real requirement?

thanks for returns and help on this point

cheers

-alan

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Re: Artifacts with License Notice Distribution Requirements and Maven the build tool

[Anders Hammar <an...@hammar.net>]

a) no

b) For some use cases yes. For others, no. Regardless if it's a
"requirement" or not, support doesn't exist in Maven core. Someone needs to
implement it. Doing it via a plugin is one path. A different path is to
handle it in the repo manager.

/Anders

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 07:46, Alan Painter <al...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I've been searching the archives for information on how maven
> addresses the licensing requirements of its contained artifacts but
> haven't found an answer.
>
> I'm referring to "maven" the build tool and not referring to the maven
> central repository or any repository in particular.
>
> Many artifacts assembled via maven (again, the tool and not the
> repository) require that a license notice accompany the downloaded
> artifact(s).
>
> To this extent, one should be able to indicate in the POM of a
> particular artifact that one (or more) license notices be retrieved
> and delivered to the local repository at the same moment as the
> artifact itself.
>
> Please note that this should be the normal course of events for a
> normal build goal (ex: mvn install) and not be some special goal,
> because it should be mandatory on the retrieval of the artifact into
> the local repository.
>
> Furthermore, I would suggest that  retrieving the license file into
> the local repository is not sufficient: an information line in the
> normal build log should indicate the license (or group of licenses)
> with a link to the license file recovered in the local repository.
>
> I think that this is the requirement for maven, as a build tool, to
> permit a POM to indicate the license requirement and to enforce that
> license requirement (i.e. copying the license notice and making the
> copy conspicuous to the receiver) as part of a standard build.
>
> If you've gotten this far, then I have two questions:
>
> (a) Does maven allow this today?  (And, please, don't mention any
> maven license plugins -- it must be part of the box standard build)
>
> (b) If not possible, don't you agree that this is the real requirement?
>
> thanks for returns and help on this point
>
> cheers
>
> -alan
>
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> To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@maven.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@maven.apache.org
>
>

Re: Artifacts with License Notice Distribution Requirements and Maven the build tool

[Wayne Fay <wa...@gmail.com>]

> Many artifacts assembled via maven (again, the tool and not the
> repository) require that a license notice accompany the downloaded
> artifact(s).

Such licenses should be contained within the jar files themselves, and
this should be sufficient from a legal standpoint (IANAL). In this
manner, it is wholly impossible to access the jar file without
receiving the license notice.

> (a) Does maven allow this today?  (And, please, don't mention any
> maven license plugins -- it must be part of the box standard build)

There has been some discussion of this a few times on the Users list
and on the Dev list, but I'm unaware of any specific functionality
that exists which addresses your concerns.

As an aside, you must not really understand how Maven works if you say
this can't be part of a plugin -- nearly everything in Maven exists as
a plugin. You can't even compile a project with what is distributed as
Maven version 3.0.2 downloadable from the website.

> (b) If not possible, don't you agree that this is the real requirement?

Who's requirement?? Yours? If so, feel free to alter the Maven core
code and submit a contribution that may or may not be accepted for
inclusion in a future Maven release.

Wayne

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