I just noticed that there was a recent change to our LICENSE file to make it exactly match the Apache 2.0 License [1]. This seems to be the result of two conflicting LICENSE issues.
Go LICENSE issue: The motivation for [1] was to satisfy pkg.go.dev's license policies [2]. Prior to the change our documentation didn't show up there [3]. Java artifact LICENSE issue: The removed text contained information relevant to "convenience binary distributions". This text was added in [4] as a result of this dev@ thread [5], where we noticed that copyright notices were missing in binary artifacts. The suggested solution (that we went with) was to just add the information to the root (source) LICENSE. I'm not sure that that solution is consistent with this ASF guide [6] which states: > The LICENSE and NOTICE files must *exactly* represent the contents of the distribution they reside in. Only components and resources that are actually included in a distribution have any bearing on the content of that distribution's NOTICE and LICENSE. I would argue that *just* Apache 2.0 is the correct text for our root (source) LICENSE, and the correct way to deal with binary artifacts is to generate per-artifact LICENSE/NOTICE files. So right now the Go issue is fixed, but the Java artifact issue has regressed. I can think of two potential solutions to resolve both: 1) Restore the "convenience binary distributions" information, and see if we can get pkg.go.dev to allow it. 2) Add infrastructure to generate LICENSE and NOTICE files for Java binary artifacts. I have no idea how we might implement (2) so (1) seems more tenable, but less correct since it's adding information not relevant to the source release. Brian [1] https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/11657 [2] https://pkg.go.dev/license-policy [3] https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/apache/[email protected]+incompatible/sdks/go/pkg/beam [4] https://github.com/apache/beam/pull/5461 [5] https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/6ef6630e908147ee83e1f1efd4befbda43efb2a59271c5cb49473103@%3Cdev.beam.apache.org%3E [6] https://infra.apache.org/licensing-howto.html
