Hi Legal team,
I am not subscribing the list so please cc me when reply. Thanks. :)
The Apache Dubbo podling community is reviewing a release candidate of
dubbo-admin, a potential copyright issue is identified, and the
community would like to confirm with ASF legal team.
The dubbo admin 0.2.0 release candidate contains a front end project
which is based on Nodejs and npm. There is a transitive dependency
called wordwrap[1], in this dependency there is a file called
idleness.txt which is written by Bertrand Russell, the copyright text
is as follows[3]:
"In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1932) – Copyrighted in the
United States until 2027 due to Renewal R320904"
wordwrap is a dev dependency, which means it is only used during
development, and won't be used in production. The npm dependency tree
is as follows:
dubbo-admin-ui@1.0.0
./dubbo-admin-ui
├─┬ eslint@3.19.0
│ └─┬ optionator@0.8.2
│ └── wordwrap@1.0.0
└─┬ webpack@3.12.0
└─┬ uglifyjs-webpack-plugin@0.4.6
└─┬ uglify-js@2.8.29
└─┬ yargs@3.10.0
└─┬ cliui@2.1.0
└── wordwrap@0.0.2
The problem is that when a user download the source code, and type
"npm install", the wordwrap will be downloaded together with the
idleness.txt file.
I was trying to avoid downloading wordwrap by "npm install
--production", but a subsequent "npm run build" step will fail because
the dev dependencies are necessary.
I also tried to exclude the wordwrap dependency, since I am not very
familiar with front end, I did not find a way to do it.
While eslint and webpack are all popular modules used in Node.js, the
project can work without these modules unless complete refactoring.
If it is the case, a further check shows that few other ASF projects
may have the same issue[4].
I am writing to confirm with legal team that:
- Is this against copyright law?
- Can the release candidate be released?
Could you please give some advice on this?
[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/wordwrap
[2] https://github.com/substack/node-wordwrap/blob/master/test/idleness.txt
[3] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Bertrand_Arthur_William_Russell
[4] https://github.com/search?l=JSON&q=org%3Aapache+eslint&type=Code
--
Best Regards！
Huxing
