Hi Craig,
Craig L Russell wrote:
Hi Mark,
On Dec 19, 2007, at 1:12 PM, Mark Brouwer wrote:
At the other hand for the Cheiron project I put the NOTICE and LICENSE
in the download JAR files of services as they are actually transfered to
clients of the service and end up on file systems, where they might
linger in eternity.
If the artifacts are intended to be distributed and used independently
(as apparently these jars are, as well as any jars uploaded to e.g.
maven's distribution mechanism) they should have NOTICE and LICENSE
files in their contents as well. They would belong in the top level or
in the META-INF directory of the distribution jar/zip files.
I would say these JAR files are distributed due to objects being
marshalled, i.e. a client obtains (indirectly) a marshalled object,
unmarshals it and as a result a JAR file is downloaded to load the classes.
In most cases it is safe to assume that those who receive the download
JAR files are also the ones that obtained the distribution of the
service as well, but in theory you never know.
I have no problem in putting a NOTICE and LICENSE file in the download
JAR files but I'm in doubt of the actual legal value of it. Say I
develop a service for which the license terms are GPL2 for the download
JAR file and make that service publicly available, what will the
consequence be if a closed source client consumes the GPL2 download JAR
file.
Nevertheless I've found it handy if JAR files alone would contain a
NOTICE file and all relevant license files, because with some Open
Source projects you are spending endless hours to find out which
licenses apply to the parts you are interested in.
--
Mark
