Hi, Looking in legal it seem the short vs long license hasn't been fully resolved and there's a few different views on it ie see [1] which has been reopened. However both Roy [1] [2] and the licence how to [3] and this [4] say short licences / pointers are preferred.
The (short) discussion on legal around the Squiggly license hasn't brought up any objections to the current LICENSE and NOTICE and confirms that we shouldn't add anything to NOTICE. Although even that may also be considered unresolved [5], there seems to be mostly consensus on this [6]. I think some of the confusion here is that when you remove a copyright header from a file and replace it with an Apache one then you do need to add the copyright to the NOTICE file, and in some case people have added copyright notices to to NOTICE when the headers have remained the same, but that isn't legally required other than in a few rare cases. [6] Current consensus is to a) use license pointers, b) keep licences as short, c) keep stuff out of NOTICE unless legally required (as it impacts downstream projects). a and b are optional ie you can still use the full licence if you want, but still meet the legal requirements. It's also clear than MIT/BSD (3 clause) licensed software do not need to be added to NOTICE [3] (even though some projects have done this). The only legal JIRA I can find on aggregation is with open office and deals with the aggregation of LGPL dictionaries. [7] In the end they were allowed to included the LGPL dictionaries in their binary releases. They have chosen to use full licence text in their LICENSE file (2000 lines long!) [8] and have included more than what's the minimal legally required in their NOTICE [9]. But interestingly the dictionaries in questions are not even mentioned in LICENSE or NOTICE but instead are have short text without pointers in separate LICENSE [10] and NOTICE files [11]. This is a little different to our situation as it's for LGPL licence code which is normally not allowed to be included in Apache software. I think the only conclusion is that there is not a single right way to do this and I think the best way forward to basically leave the license as it is (with some minor word changes suggested by Alex) until we find out otherwise and then change if needed. We are complying with the minimal legal requirements and currently practice (ie use license pointers and MIT/BSD don't modify NOTICE) but probably have a little more in LICENSE than the legal minimum but that's not a licensing error. Thanks, Justin 1. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-155 2. http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201203.mbox/%3ccbfe3722-1b5c-48fc-ad82-0931eec6f...@gbiv.com%3E 3. http://www.apache.org/dev/licensing-howto.html#permissive-deps 4. http://apache.org/dev/release.html#distributing-code-under-several-licenses 5. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-59 6. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-62 7. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-117 8. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/blob/trunk/main/LICENSE 9. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/blob/trunk/main/NOTICE 10. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/blob/trunk/main/LICENSE_aggregated 11. https://github.com/apache/openoffice/blob/trunk/main/NOTICE_aggregated
