On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Sean Owen <sro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Unfortunately, Netty does not include NOTICE.txt in any of its jars
> for you. This text does not appear therefore in the Drill binary
> distro. At least, I grepped up and down the whole distro and didn't
> see it, and it's not in the Netty jars.
>
> What's the theory that this meets the requirements of Netty's AL2 license?
>
The relevant part of the AL2 license says:
and If the Work includes a "NOTICE" text file as part of its distribution,
> then any Derivative Works that You distribute must include a readable copy
> of the attribution notices contained within such NOTICE file, excluding
> those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works, in
> at least one of the following places: within a NOTICE text file distributed
> as part of the Derivative Works; within the Source form or documentation,
> if provided along with the Derivative Works; or, within a display generated
> by the Derivative Works, if and wherever such third-party notices normally
> appear.
Netty's artifacts ("its distribution") do not include a notice. Thus,
Drill does not create one. As far as I can tell, Netty is doing precisely
as Marvin suggests ... they have an attribution in the source and have made
a determination that they do not need a NOTICE file in the jar artifact.
The fact that they do not have such a NOTICE indicates that they do not
require us to propagate said non-existent NOTICE.
Were we to include their sources, I would expect that we would preserve
their NOTICE file since their source code includes such a thing.
To summarize:
ALv2 says that *if* a NOTICE exists in a distribution, then inclusion of
that distribution requires propagation of the content of that NOTICE.
Clearly, if such a NOTICE does not exist, there is no such burden.
Roy (in 2008, one of the original authors of the ASL) says propagating
NOTICE content willy nilly is bad and not a good thing, thus confirming the
inference that lack of a NOTICE in an included artifact implies no further
burden.
Netty does not include a NOTICE in their jars, apparently in compliance
with the license and Roy's interpretation.
Sean says that since Netty does not have such a NOTICE in their
distribution, we have to go further back up the family tree to find or
invent one and that not inventing the missing NOTICE somehow violates
Netty's ASL in spite of the fact that their license says that we don't have
to do that.
Sean further seems to imply that we have to go further back up the family
tree to find any defect in any handling of license software and take it on
ourselves to repair this defect by inventing new NOTICE content.
I say that this way lies madness.
