On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Hyrum K. Wright <hyrum_wri...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote: > In doing the recent license audit work[1], one of the big remaining sections > is packages/, primarily the stuff which is used to build the MSI installer on > Windows. We have several files which include the a copyright notice > attributing them to Microsoft, and upon further research, they look to be > part of the WiX distribution. WiX is an open source tool released under the > CPL[2] which is used to create MSI packages for Windows. > > Because of this licensing scenario, I don't think we can reasonably relicense > these files[3]. We can still distribute them, probably, but IANAL. My > question is: do we need to distribute packages/ in the first place, or is > that area of our repository just a means for people working on packaging to > version control their scripts and such. > > Any advice on this topic would be appreciated, especially since clearing up > the licensing is an important step toward graduating from the Incubator.
>From a legal perspective, it's definitely safe to (re)distribute those WiX files. See: http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b Looking at those files (which are just XML files), the same rationale that applies to the DTD example applies here. As a point of reference, httpd sticks its packaging stuff in a separate directory - see: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/win32-msi/trunk/ So, just moving packaging/ up to be parallel with trunk may be a 'good thing'. YMMV. -- justin
