Questions On John Ament's copyright announcement

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Emily Jiang

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Apr 12, 2017, 5:45:11 PM4/12/17
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I am trying to update the files in the microprofile-config based on John's announcement. I have the following questions.

1. I understand in each file, we will put the following copyright header

/*
 **********************************************************************
 * Copyright (c) {2016, 2017} Contributors to the Eclipse Foundation
 *
 * See the NOTICES file(s) distributed with this work for additional
 * information regarding copyright ownership.
 *
 * All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
 * are made available under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * which accompanies this distribution and is available at
 * http://www.opensource.org/licenses/apache2.0.php
 *
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
 **********************************************************************/
Is (2016, 2017) the right filling for the date in John's template? I thought we need to use year range, rather than a specific date. I may be wrong.
Do we need to list the contributors in each file?
Do we need to list the contribution history?
I guess each class needs to retain the @author list. Right?

2. As for the Notice file, it is one per jar. It seems that we need to list every company who contributed towards the jar plus all individuals (who contribute any files in this jar). Right?

Thanks
Emily


John D. Ament

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Apr 12, 2017, 10:55:41 PM4/12/17
to MicroProfile, Wayne Beaton
Wayne,

Would you be able to provide input on Emily's questions?

John

Wayne Beaton

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Apr 13, 2017, 11:53:05 AM4/13/17
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The date can either be a single year or a range of years separated by a comma. The curly braces in the template shouldn't appear in the actual header.

e.g. " Copyright (c) 2016, 2017 Contributors to the Eclipse Foundation "

The NOTICES file replaces the old requirement for an about.html file as described in the Guide to the Legal Documentation [1]. Note that we are in the process of revising this documentation and Eclipse MicroProfile on the bleeding edge of that process. One of the primary problems with our legal documentation requirements is that it is very focused on Eclipse Platform Plug-in type artifacts. We're generalizing it to be independent of any particular implementation technology.

Note also that we're in the process of adopting SPDX [2] as the format for the NOTICES file. We're still just sorting out what sort of information we feel needs to be captured in these files, so be prepared for some follow up (i.e. changes in requirements).

We require that a NOTICES file be included with each unit distribution artifact. For a Java application, this unit artifact is generally a JAR or some sort of similar archive format (WAR). Ideally, this NOTICES file should contain information that is specific to the content that it accompanies. If one particular JAR has some content under different licensing terms, for example, that needs to be indicated in the NOTICES file. Let me know if you need any help with that sort of thing.

The notices file needs to list the copyright holders. This is different from the contributors and contribution history (Git tracks this stuff). The list of copyright holders will probably be a list of companies and some individuals.

How or if you choose to use the @author tags is entirely up to the project team.

I think that I've answered all of your questions. Let me know if I've missed something.

We're tracking the evolution of this new means of specifying headers and NOTICES on Bug 514948 [3].

Wayne

[1] https://eclipse.org/legal/guidetolegaldoc.php

[2] https://spdx.org/

[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=514948

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Ondrej Mihályi

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Apr 15, 2017, 5:16:51 PM4/15/17
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Hi John,

We have a small issue with the suggested header and that it's missing the some text required by the Apache license.

I suggest extending the license header as follows:

/**********************************************************************
* Copyright (c) {DATE} Contributors to the Eclipse Foundation
 *
 * See the NOTICES file(s) distributed with this work for additional
 * information regarding copyright ownership.
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
*
* SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
**********************************************************************/

I also documented this on the wiki here: https://wiki.eclipse.org/ContributingGuidelines#License_header (the header already includes what I suggest)

If you agree, please also reply in the original mail thread with the updated header, so that people aren't confused: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/microprofile/sRqsnPTkkKE/V657wvPWAgAJ

--Ondrej

Dňa štvrtok, 13. apríla 2017 17:53:05 UTC+2 Wayne Beaton napísal(-a):

Mark Struberg

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Apr 16, 2017, 4:08:31 AM4/16/17
to MicroProfile
1+ 

This is the license header as described in the Apache License itself.
See http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 and scroll to the bottom.

This is the definite legal source and the other benefit is that this form of the header is automatically detected by every framework and tool around.

LieGrue,
strub

John D. Ament

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Apr 16, 2017, 8:45:18 PM4/16/17
to MicroProfile
Basically, don't shoot the messenger here..

John C, Kevin S and I received an email from Eclipse Legal on a new license header.  I communicated the content of that email to the MicroProfile community.  There is an open ticket [1] in IP Zilla (?) to track this, where the new header was created.  I've already pointed out that the new header does not satisfy the Apache License V2's requirements on how to apply to work.  I have not seen a response yet from Wayne, but suspect we will soon.  I've also pointed out that the usage of NOTICE is only required in the Apache License, and other licenses need not carry this forward, so while the foundation may want to use this, its not required by consumers to leverage it.

John

Werner Keil

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Apr 17, 2017, 5:11:28 PM4/17/17
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One minor question before starting to spread that header everywhere, what's the exact reason for the double plural

 See the NOTICES file(s)

The file itself is called NOTICE, not NOTICES.
And "file(s)" says enough about the possibility of more than one.

Werner

Mark Struberg

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Apr 18, 2017, 10:03:35 AM4/18/17
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Actually the question was about the copyright part and not the license part of the header.


>  the usage of NOTICE is only required in the Apache License

Yes, and since we use the Apache License we are free to leverage this mechanism.

LieGrue,
strub


Am Montag, 17. April 2017 02:45:18 UTC+2 schrieb John D. Ament:

Mark Struberg

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Apr 18, 2017, 10:06:36 AM4/18/17
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Good catch. Should read 'NOTICE file(s)'.

This is in case you have multiple dependencies. In which case you might end up with mulitple notice files.
Will fix this.

LieGrue,
strub
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