On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 07:58 -0800, Brian Behlendorf wrote: > On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Jeffrey Thompson wrote: > > Interesting question. First, a perspective point. The copyright notice in > > the file is primarily for Apache's benefit. It puts people on notice that > > Apache claims copyright on the material. > > Well, first, it really should be: > > Copyright [yyyy] The Apache Software Foundation or its licensors, as > applicable. > > The board has been lax in asking the developers to adopt this new > attribution, which is much more appropriate than just saying "Copyright > The Apache Software Foundation"; the original contributions remain owned > by their contributors, we're simply granted a right to redistribute; we do > have a compilation copyright though, as I understand it. > > > On the other hand, the license (though it does have some benefit to Apache) > > is primarily for the user's benefit. Without it, the user has no license > > at all. > > > > So, is the user put at a disadvantage in any way because the license isn't > > embedded in the JavaDoc? Wouldn't anyone who understands how JavaDoc works > > know exactly how to find out what license is available for that material? > > My sense is that this is splitting hairs a bit and that the full license, > or even the reference to it, doesn't need to be included in the javadoc > output - just as we don't embed it as a string in compiled code when we > distribute binaries. Would someone reasonably be able to claim that they > didn't know there was a copyright on that file simply because we didn't > put a notice in it? My guess is probably not, or if so, no big deal. >
Thanks Brian and Jeffrey. I intend to start a vote on commons-dev for jakarta-commons-digester to: (a) change the javadoc copyright statement to the one listed by Brian above, and (b) remove the license text from the javadoc. Is it ok with both of you if I quote the relevant bits from your emails? I'm asking because this *is* a closed list, unlike commons-dev. If I don't get a response, I'll quote with attribution going to "anonymous" :-) Regards, Simon
