Yes, don't make up copyright notices. However, attribution is important, so it may be important to say something.
My role model for this, before I started paying attention to Apache projects, were the THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME files that Sun installed with all of their binary distributions, including for OpenOffice.org releases. I am not so concerned about the NOTICE getting a bit lengthy so long as folks realize what it is. If license statements need to be reproduced, as in the case of a BSD-equivalent, my one recent experiment at a NOTICE on a (derivative) work of my own making has that at the bottom of the NOTICE file below the more-brief "portions of ... " acknowledgments for third-party-origin material. The license text is a numbered reference. (I think 2nd party is a direct contributor yes, where the 1st party is the downstream producer of the derivative works, i.e., an Apache project? Or is it the reverse?) This approach keeps the attribution summaries brief and at the top where they can be reviewed easily. I go so far as to say where the original work can be found upstream if I can. That's a personal policy. The pattern is that provenance is clear and that someone adopting or examining my software also has a friendly pointer to any still-available original for satisfying their own interests, finding other goodies, etc. I also provide upstream patches to simple things I notice. (I must get around to some of that at the moment [;<). - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Leo Simons [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 13:23 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Missing NOTICE Information? Hey Paolo, On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 12:21 PM, Paolo Castagna <[email protected]> wrote: [ ... ] > In the case of LARQ this is what I did (and moved on with life). > > """ > Apache Jena - LARQ module > Copyright 2011 The Apache Software Foundation > > This product includes software developed at > The Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/). > > Portions of this software were originally based on the following: > > - Copyright 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP > - Copyright 2010 Epimorphics Ltd. > - Copyright 2010 Talis Information Ltd. > - Copyright 2010, 2011 Talis Systems Ltd. Sorry, but that's not what I said. Be careful :-) Dennis pointed out that there used to be HP copyright notices and that they are now gone. So I pointed out the rules which explain that you cannot remove third party copyright notices completely (if you _are_ or _are representing_ a party, you can, but that means you are, err, 2nd party, not third party), but you can and should move them to the NOTICE file. You should NOT be adding any copyright notices for 3rd parties where those notices were not there previously. So unless these notices above were at some point in the LARQ source code, they should not be in the NOTICE file. cheers, Leo
