LGPL and copyright notice

[Jeremy Carroll]

Sorry in advance. This is a painfully pedantic message.

Brief: please include an appropriate copyright notice and
disclaimer of warranty with both download files.

Long version:

I'm using BrowserLauncher2 (v1.0) in my code (the Jena GRDDL Reader),
see http://jena.sourceforge.net/grddl/. It will be included in the
next release (version 0.2).

I'm just tidying up the documentation, which includes the licenses
etc. for the subsystems.
See (the end of)
http://jena.sourceforge.net/grddl/license.html

It is surprisingly difficult to comply with your license terms, because the required items are not included with either download file.

The license terms require, an appropriate copyright notice and
disclaimer of warranty, to be distributed with the BrowserLauncher2-10.jar
which I am about to distribute as part of my code.

I ended up deciding that given the lack of an appropriate copyright notice
in the original, that
"Each source file is copyrighted separately, please download  the source code for details."
was an appropriate copyright notice.

I copied the disclaimer of warranty from the BrowserLaucher.java file.

The relevant license terms are:
[[
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Library's
complete source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that
you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an
appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact
all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any
warranty; and distribute a copy of this License along with the
Library.
 

4. You may copy and distribute the Library (or a portion or
derivative of it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form
under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you accompany
it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which
must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a
medium customarily used for software interchange.
  If distribution of object code is made by offering access to copy
from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the
source code from the same place satisfies the requirement to
distribute the source code, even though third parties are not
compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
]]

[Jeff Chapman]

Hi Jeremy,

A README.txt and COPYING.txt file are included with each jar file. Unpack them and you will see them at the top level.

The COPYING.txt file contains the text of the GNU LESSER GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

Does that solve your problem? I don't understand what else you would need.

Jeff

[Jeremy Carroll]

Sorry for the delay in replying.

I found those two files, and no they did not address the issue.

I am required to:
[[
provided that
you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an
appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty
]]

In a file such as BrowserLancher.java I find both of these items:

[[
Copyright 2004,2005,2006 Markus Gebhard, Jeff Chapman
]]

and

[[
BrowserLauncher2 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
]]

I guess I am looking for text like the following, prominently in the top-level. Either in its own document or in README.txt

[[
BrowserLauncher2 is
Copyright 2004-2007 Markus Gebhard, Jeff Chapman **full list of authors**

BrowserLauncher2 is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    BrowserLauncher2 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
    along with BrowserLauncher2; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA
]]

I also note that it is not usual to look inside jars for such notices, but ...

Also the LGPL requires re-shippers of BrowserLauncher2-10.jar to also re-ship BrowserLauncher2-all-10.jar, which I meet simply because we are both hosted on sourceforge!

(Hmmm, probably I should include BrowserLauncher2-all-10.jar, perhaps as a zip, in my download, so that people reshipping my code, in binary, automatically reship your source, the link probably suffices)