Hi Devs, While working on the release, faced few issues w.r.t. License.txt: 1. I found that we do not record the license of the third-party libs anywhere in the repository. There should be some place where we must add the licenses that are redistributed irrespective of the distro package. This is because - the developer adding the JAR is the best person to include the License and; we don't miss on including License for any JARS being shipped. 2. I found that there is a need to manually change the License files while creating the release artifacts - license files being different for all 5 packages we ship(src, all bin packages acc. to hadoop version - 20,23,1.x,2.x). 3. With so many distro packages it is a confusion as to what all licenses should be present in the LICENSE.txt present in trunk.
The motive of this mail is to discuss on the points as to how we can maintain and automate the Licenses. Jarcec has already filed a JIRA for this purpose - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SQOOP-437. We can consider the discussion as a part of this JIRA. Just to start off: a. For #1 above I think we can have a single file containing all the licenses(or one file per license/jar) irrespective of the distro, devs to keep on appending/removing licenses in this(these) file(s). b. For #2, we will be able to automate the license file generation process - if we have all the licenses somewhere in trunk. Suggestions would be appreciated on how we can automate this generation using any framework - last/backup approach being adhoc script. c. For #3, we can take following approaches: i. All the licenses to be kept in the LICENSE.txt present in trunk. I personally vote for this because it will also solve the problem of maintaining all the licenses - mentioned in #1 above. ii. Keep licenses of jars to be included in src package only. iii. Keep the license file as it is now. Let me know your suggestions. It would appreciated if anyone can suggest any other options that we can take. Thanks, Abhijeet
