To summarize, it looks like there are two issues: 1. Should the entire file header be moved into NOTICE when a third-party file is contributed, or should we edit it 2. When including all or part of another ASF project is the standard NOTICE sufficient?
I went back through legal-discuss and found that #2 has already been asked and answered on https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-234. The recommendation from Mark Thomas was to not copy the standard NOTICE contents from other projects. Marvin Humphrey also notes that this documentation is canonical: http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#notice and the other with confusing clause (“must be considered”) is advisory. The same canonical documentation also covers source file headers for code that was contributed. This is the document that we used when we brought in the contribution with the full Cloudera header. It states: If the source file is submitted with a copyright notice included in it, the copyright owner (or owner’s agent) must either: a. remove such notices, or b. move them to the NOTICE file associated with each applicable project release, or c. provide written permission for the ASF to make such removal or relocation of the notices. That’s why we waited to merge the PR until someone from Cloudera had consented to moving the header. We didn’t ask whether we could edit the header at that time. Given that we are careful to document consent to move the header in this situation, I don’t think that we should edit it years after the contribution. Everyone at the time thought that the header was the entire block of text; while I understand where you’re drawing a distinction, I think it is reasonable to continue publishing the entire header as it was found in the original contribution. Are you satisfied with those answers, Justin? On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 6:57 PM Justin Mclean <jus...@classsoftware.com> wrote: > Hi, > > > At the time, we considered the whole header to be the relevant "Copyright > > notification". Do you think this practice is incorrect? > > I’ve not seem other projects do it this way, it's generally: > "Portions of this software were developed at > Acme Inc, copyright 20XX.” > > > Which ones are you referring to? > > > > I just went through the ones that you mentioned: > > * Spark's NOTICE doesn't have relevant portions, considering what is used > > is the check-license script and some Parquet vectorization code. > > * Same for Hive's NOTICE because the only portion of Hive that is used > is a > > SQL file with metastore table definitions. > > * The relevant portion of Parquet's notice is the code from Cloudera and > > the Iceberg NOTICE contains the same text. > > * Avro's NOTICE contains mostly entries for the C# project and the only > > code from Avro is the decimal conversion code. > > * The iBATIS NOTICE contains two full relocated copyright headers, with > > Copyright attributed to the HSQL Development Group and the Hypersonic SQL > > group. ScriptRunner that is included in Iceberg was written by Clinton > > Begin, who started the ASF project, so those sections aren't relevant. > > The Spark notice contains: > "Apache Spark > Copyright 2014 and onwards The Apache Software Foundation.” > > The Hive notice contains: > "Apache Hive > Copyright 2008-2018 The Apache Software Foundation” > > etc > > This I believe would apply to your notice file. > > > Can you explain a bit more about this? > > See above. > > Thanks, > Justin > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org > > -- Ryan Blue
