On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Hyrum K. Wright
<hyrum_wright_at_mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> 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.
From a legal perspective, it's definitely safe to (re)distribute those
WiX files. See:
http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-b
Looking at those files (which are just XML files), the same rationale
that applies to the DTD example applies here.
As a point of reference, httpd sticks its packaging stuff in a
separate directory - see:
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/win32-msi/trunk/
So, just moving packaging/ up to be parallel with trunk may be a 'good
thing'. YMMV. -- justin
Received on 2009-12-10 20:29:14 CET