On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 4:45 AM, Benson Margulies <bimargul...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Why are podlings having so much trouble getting the legal metadata
> correct?
* Our documentation on legal metadata is ill-organized, voluminous, and
ultimately overwhelming.
* The NOTICE construct is fundamentally confusing.
* Few software developers have the patience, the temperament, and more than
anything else the raw hours to acquire a lot of expertise about licensing.
> Adding all of this up, I've got a very modest proposal. Let's create a
> checklist, put it prominently at the top of the relevant doc, and then
> see if we can't improve the visibility of this.
I am skeptical that the information necessary to build LICENSE and NOTICE can
be expressed in a checklist. The problem is that LICENSE and NOTICE still
start as blank pages, and filling them in from scratch requires expertise
which is costly to acquire.
I suspect that a "LICENSE-o-matic" approach will yield better results, because
it relieves the developer from having to conceive of a basic structure for
LICENSE and NOTICE. Here is some sample pseudocode for appending dependency
information to NOTICE:
SUBROUTINE append_to_notice(notice, dependency):
# Only bundled dependencies get considered for NOTICE!
IF NOT dependency.bundled:
RETURN
IF dependency.license IS MIT_X11:
PASS # No NOTICE requirement
ELIF dependency.license IS THREE_CLAUSE_BSD:
PASS # No NOTICE requirement
ELIF dependency.license IS APACHE_LICENSE_V2:
IF has_notice_file(dependency):
IF is_apache_product(dependency):
...
ELSE
...
ELIF dependency.license IS FOUR_CLAUSE_BSD:
...
...
# Recurse for nested dependencies.
FOR nested_dependency IN dependency.nested_dependencies:
append_to_notice(notice, nested_dependency)
For the beginning of such a document, see...
How-to guide for "Assembling LICENSE and NOTICE"
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INCUBATOR-125
PS: This thread was originally about how our hyper-focus on LICENSE and
NOTICE distracts us from more important concerns, both legal and social.
I agree with that assessment and regret contributing to the diversion once
more.
Marvin Humphrey
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