Saxon

SourceForge user: mhkay

Thanks for your efforts on this. Please note that there is a legal requirement that any distribution of Saxon code in source or binary form includes copies of the third party legal notices associated with components such as the normalization code from the Unicode consortium. I'm not prepared to get involved in any packaging exercise that doesn't address this requirement, which most Maven packaging efforts seem to ignore entirely.

SourceForge user: mdaniel

Is it okay if they are included in the jar, under a "licenses" directory or "META-INF/licenses", perhaps?

I also want to point out that the saxon9he.jar which one finds in saxonhe9-3-0-4j.zip does not contain any such licenses.

However, with your direction I will gladly update the POM files to reflect your wishes.

Thanks for your time.

SourceForge user: mhkay

Thanks for pointing out that the license files are not present in the Sourceforge download. That's embarrassing - it's caused by an oversight in my build scripts. There's been a fair bit of discussion on saxon-help and elsewhere about how the requirements to deliver licenses could be met with Maven. The Unicode license (and the others are similar) says "the above copyright notice(s) and this permission notice [must] appear with all copies of the Data Files or Software". I have always felt that burying the notice inside the JAR file doesn't truly satisfy the requirement that it should "appear", ie. should be apparent, and I don't know any other way to meet this requirement in Maven.

SourceForge user: mdaniel

It looks like that if the POM contains the license declaration (which my patch does not, but can), then Maven will print out the license information on demand: http://www.mail-archive.com/users@maven.apache.org/msg99628.html

Also, FWIW, Google's GWT provides all the license files (including the Unicode license) inside its jar file: http://grepcode.com/file/repo1.maven.org/maven2/com.google.gwt/gwt-dev/2.2.0/unicode-license.txt

I would venture to say that an organization such as Google doing that way sets a reasonable legal precedent.

The other school of thought is that if the set of licenses are so important to the Saxon project, then emitting them on a "--help" or "--version" screen sounds like a good project goal.