> The way I see it nbbuild/licenses are 'families'. And the 'License:'
> header in external/*-license.txt points to a family. A changing author line
> doesn't change the license itself / the license family.


> You and I are not the target audience for it - lawyers are. If that's what
gets combined into the license agreement dialog, by far the safest bet is
to include them unaltered from their origin, and if that means two files
with a minor  diff, so be it.

For a big company that wants to use NetBeans or the platform, they are
likely to actually have their lawyers review all the licenses involved.
Question 1 is, are these really all the exact licenses. If the answer to
that is no, some have been altered but are are almost the same plus or
minus this text or that, the only responsible course of action is for the
lawyer to find all the original libraries and review the real original
licenses one by one. Most likely they give an estimate of how many hours
that will take, and the company decides not to use NetBeans - lawyers
aren't cheap.

So I get it - but a lawyer would not be able to use "it's this family of
license" because it could have an alteration that materially changes the
terms, and without seeing the original they can't guarantee that.

-Tim
-- 
http://timboudreau.com

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