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  1. Spark
  2. SPARK-10833

Inline, organize BSD/MIT licenses in LICENSE

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Details

    • Improvement
    • Status: Resolved
    • Major
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • 1.5.0
    • 1.5.2, 1.6.0
    • Build
    • None

    Description

      In the course of https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-226 it came to light that the guidance at http://www.apache.org/dev/licensing-howto.html#permissive-deps means that permissively-licensed dependencies has a different interpretation than we (er, I) had been operating under. "pointer ... to the license within the source tree" specifically means a copy of the license within Spark's distribution, whereas at the moment, Spark's LICENSE has a pointer to the project's license in the other project's source tree.

      The remedy is simply to inline all such license references (i.e. BSD/MIT licenses) or include their text in "licenses" subdirectory and point to that.

      Along the way, we can also treat other BSD/MIT licenses, whose text has been inlined into LICENSE, in the same way.

      The LICENSE file can continue to provide a helpful list of BSD/MIT licensed projects and a pointer to their sites. This would be over and above including license text in the distro, which is the essential thing.

      I do not think this blocks a current release, since there's a good-faith argument that the current practice satisfies the terms of the third-party licenses as well. (If it didn't, this would be a blocker for any further release.) However, of course it's better to follow the best practice going forward.

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            srowen Sean R. Owen
            srowen Sean R. Owen
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              Created:
              Updated:
              Resolved: