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Hi Sharon,
The summary is I'm not sure if I need to add notice.html to the
Triquetrum builds using Tycho. I've cc'd the incubation list
because this came up recently there and have included the thread
for your reference.
A big part of my job at Berkeley is dealing with licenses for
Ptolemy II, so I'm very interested in seeing how Eclipse handles
licenses and also in getting it right, hence my overly detailed
questions.
The details:
I started looking into this because in the Triquetrum Initial CQ
approval (dev.eclipse.org/ipzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10434), you
wrote:
We would ask the project to ensure it has in place all required legal bits as
described here [1] in case that has not been done.
The SUA usually appears in the root directory of Eclipse
builds as the file named "notice.html". A copy of the
Project's primary license(s) must appear in the same location
as the SUA. In most cases this will be the Eclipse Public
License alone.
Note: The appropriate SUA and a copy of any
referenced license must be located in the
root directory of any Eclipse.org distributed build (typically
distributed as a ZIP file). Any web page that makes builds
available must have a link to the
appropriate SUA with appropriate wording.
The SUA Checklist
I'm not sure what a build distribution is. Are all
distributions build distributions or is it only a distribution
that includes source files?
Every build distribution, such as a zip or tar file, must
contain a Eclipse Foundation Software User Agreement
(known as the "SUA") in the root directory of the distribution
in HTML format in a file named "notice.html".
I decided to look at the Eclipse download and it does not seem to
have notice.html at the top level
First of all, the guide says that including the standard SUA in
the project root
as "notice.html" is required.
However, the standard SUA is very much EPL-based and seems written
from the
perspective of the main Eclipse IDE project. I appreciate that it
says "unless
otherwise indicated", and that I can indicate (by adding an about
file and a
license file) that we operate on a different license (EDL, in our
case).
Nevertheless, including it in the project root in this fashion is
bound to
confuse potential users, and likely to cause the (incorrect)
perception that
rdf4j is EPL-licensed, or dual-licensed.
Should I just accept that confusion and include it as-is, or can I
leave it out?
As the guide says, the main purpose of the SUA is merely to say
that "unless
otherwise indicated EPL applies", and since EPL _doesn't_ apply to
our project,
it seems pointless to include it.
Second question: the guide emphasizes in several places that the
included legal
files (the about file, the license, and the SUA) must be included
as html files.
Is this really a hard requirement? The reason I ask is that plain
text (or
Markdown) would make viewing these documents on GitHub a lot
easier.
Thanks,
Jeen
--
Christopher Brooks, PMP University of California
Academic Program Manager & Software Engineer US Mail: 337 Cory Hall
CHESS/iCyPhy/Ptolemy/TerraSwarm Berkeley, CA 94720-1774
cxh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, 707.332.0670 (Office: 545Q Cory)
