Re: [Geotools-devel] Beyond review.txt: A LICENSE file for every jar

[Martin D. <mar...@ge...>]

I realize that my suggestion was incomplete. I have no objection at all against 
adding the license in the JAR file. My idea was that Maven was doing something 
close to what we want:

  * The <licenses> section in pom.xml files contains URL to relevant licenses.

  * When building the site, the licenses are copied into the generated HTML
    pages, using the content found at the URL.

  * I don't think that Maven copies the licenses into the JARs right now
    (it is probably worth to check however). But if it doesn't, I think
    that creating a Maven pluging doing that would not be difficult.

I'm just suggesting to avoid duplication of licenses texts in our SVN (they 
would be duplicated on HTML site page and in JAR files however, but those copies 
are performed automatically by Maven).

  * Maven already have a <licenses> section. It would be nice to leverage it
    (instead of adding the licenses as real files in each modules) in order
    to have a single place where we list licenses. Otherwise when updating
    the licenses in one way (in pom.xml or in the text files), there is a
    risk of forgetting to update the other way.

  * Since licenses are referenced by URL in the <licenses> section, it may
    be interresting to store the full text in a single directory, even if
    the licenses listed in <licenses> can vary for each module.

In any case, the main point is that the URL content is copied by Maven at build 
time, for the web site (already done by Maven), or for the JAR files (we can 
probably create our own Maven plugin). The proposed usage of URL in <licenses> 
is just a way to (hopefully) facilitate maintenance in keeping the licenses list 
in a single place, both for web page generation and JAR files.

	Martin