Also, if I recall, it was initially decided to not include a license header to the main README.md file in the root folder: however now that the file represents an important part of the OFBiz documentation, I think we should revisit that decision and add a license header to it.
Jacopo On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 10:21 AM, Jacopo Cappellato < [email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 9:43 AM, Jacques Le Roux < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi Devs, >> >> There are mixed opinions about putting or not the ASL2 header in OFBiz >> README files. >> >> One one hand we can read at http://www.apache.org/legal/sr >> c-headers.html#faq-exceptions that README files don't require a header >> >> But to protect our work we can decide to put a header in all README files >> (with or w/o suffixes). It's all or none to be consistent. >> >> Since License is an important matter I think a vote is necessary to >> define our policy. >> >> So please vote >> >> [+1] include a header in all README files >> >> [-1] do not include a header in any README files >> >> [0] Undecided >> >> I will close this vote in a week, thanks for your time ! >> >> Jacques >> >> > In my opinion this vote is not valid and should be cancelled. > My reasoning is the following: the result of this vote may be against the > ASF license policy and as a project we are not allowed to change the ASF > license policy by vote. In fact our codebase is licensed by the ASF and not > by OFBiz. > > Why am I saying that the result of this vote may be against the ASF > license policy? > > If we decide to "not include a header in any README files" then we will > violate the following [*]: > > "A file without any degree of creativity in either its literal elements > or its structure is not protected by copyright law; therefore, such a file > does not require a license header. If in doubt about the extent of the > file's creativity, add the license header to the file." > > In fact it would be difficult to state that the following file (for > example) does't contain "any degree of creativity": > > http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/ofbiz/trunk/README.md?view=markup > > In fact it contains useful documentation that was contributed by different > people who spent time crafting its content. > > When in doubt, we should add the license header (as stated in the document > that Jacques and I referenced); or we can omit it if we judge that the file > doesn't contain any degree of creativity. > But definitely we can't blindly decide by vote for all the files matching > a name (i.e. README) as proposed by Jacques in this vote. > Since deciding on a case by case may be tricky and even subjective, my > *personal* preference would be to add to all the files the license header. > > Kind regards, > > Jacopo > > [*] http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#faq-exceptions > > > > >
