Hi Brooklyn devs-
In prepping the new UI contribution I've been working on the LICENSE
file generation. It is rather extensive because by using Angular we
pull in hundreds of JS deps for the binary, most of them under MIT
license which as I understand it means copyright information must be
reproduced in the LICENSE for the binary dist. This is based on the MIT
clause "The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software" in
accordance with the principle that copyright extends to translations.
While it would be tempting to treat the compiled/minified version as not
a copy and so not requiring the copyright -- and that may well be the
intention of many MIT license users (contrasted with BSD which
explicitly calls out binaries as requiring the copyright) -- I don't
believe we can hide behind that. (So JS devs please take note, please
use the Apache License! :) )
Question 1: Is this correct, our binaries LICENSE files need to list
all MIT, BSD, ISC licensed dependencies whose minified/compiled output
is included in our binary dist?
In the process I've noticed we in Brooklyn don't currently distinguish
consistently between the source LICENSE and binary LICENSE. As I
understand it from [1], the LICENSE file included with source projects
-- including I believe the one at the root of the git repo -- should
refer to resources included in the source only. Dependencies that are
downloaded as part of the build and included in the binary should not be
listed in those LICENSE files, but they must be included in any binary
build (eg the RPM, TGZ).
It's not yet a big issue as it doesn't matter for Apache licensed
dependencies as they do not require copyright inclusion or attribution
and these are the bulk of what we do. Where we do need to look more
closely I think are:
(A) The Go CLI -- we use a few libraries (mainly MIT licensed)
downloaded at build time. The LICENSE file [2] includes these
libraries. This is included in the binary build, which is correct, but
it is also present at the root of that sub-project where it is
incorrect, and our source build also references these libraries which is
incorrect.
(B) JS in "brooklyn-server" -- we have a few JS libraries included in
the source tree of brooklyn-server (not downloaded during the build),
for some of the CLI commands; these are indicated in that project's
LICENSE [3], correctly, and in the binary build's LICENSE, also
correctly. But the project source LICENSE [3] seems to include all the
JS used in the "brooklyn-ui" project which is not correct.
(C) JS in existing (old) "brooklyn-ui" -- this source project includes
all the JS deps checked in, and it is listed in the LICENSE [4],
correctly, and is included in the build binary, also correctly; no
action is needed here
(D) JS in new (proposed) "brooklyn-ui" -- this project updates to use
npm and package.json so downloads dependencies, with no dependencies in
the source tree, so the project source LICENSE shouldn't list any
dependencies. However the binary license should include the ~100
dependencies that npm downloads and uglifies. Fortunately npm
license-checker [5] automates much of this (although the copyright line
will sometimes have to be teased out manually).
Question 2: Does the above sound right?
I'm reasonably confident of this so if no objections I will adjust our
LICENSE generation process to distinguish between binary and source, and
tidy up (A) and (B) above, and set up the contribution as per (D).
Finally one more question -- it's easy to tweak the process to include
Apache-licensed dependencies used in the binary. While this isn't
legally required AFAIK it seems like a nice thing to do.
Question 3: Is everyone okay with giving a shout-out to Apache-licensed
deps in addition to MIT, BSD, etc, within our binary LICENSE ?
Best
Alex
[1] https://apache.org/dev/licensing-howto.html
[2] https://github.com/apache/brooklyn-client/blob/master/cli/LICENSE
[3] https://github.com/apache/brooklyn-server/blob/master/LICENSE
[4] https://github.com/apache/brooklyn-ui/blob/master/LICENSE
[5] https://www.npmjs.com/package/license-checker
