Do we need to distribute packages/ ?

In doing the recent license audit work[1], one of the big remaining sections is packages/, primarily the stuff which is used to build the MSI installer on Windows. We have several files which include the a copyright notice attributing them to Microsoft, and upon further research, they look to be part of the WiX distribution. WiX is an open source tool released under the CPL[2] which is used to create MSI packages for Windows.

Because of this licensing scenario, I don't think we can reasonably relicense these files[3]. We can still distribute them, probably, but IANAL. My question is: do we need to distribute packages/ in the first place, or is that area of our repository just a means for people working on packaging to version control their scripts and such.

Any advice on this topic would be appreciated, especially since clearing up the licensing is an important step toward graduating from the Incubator.

Cheers,
-Hyrum

[1] See the current report of said work here: http://ci.apache.org/projects/subversion/rat-output.txt
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Public_License
[3] Basically must stuff under http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk/packages/windows-WiX/
Received on 2009-12-09 16:11:49 CET