debian/copyright for Apache Commons packages

[Onkar Shinde]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 4:56 PM, Emmanuel Bourg<ebourg at apache.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I noticed some inconsistencies in the copyright files of the Apache Commons
> packages:
>
> - Some packages still have the old Apache Software License 1.1, but they
> have been released with the AL 2.0. It affects the following packages: dbcp,
> codec, discovery, fileupload, jxpath, lang, validator. Commons EL also has
> the 1.1 license, but it was never released with the 2.0 license, so it can
> remain as is.

Is the new license applicable to the versions of these packages in
repository? If yes then a bug should be filed for every such package
with severity 'serious'.
If the new license is applicable to the versions not yet in repository
then someone needs to update the versions of the packages. :-)

> - The mention "All rights reserved" can be found in libcommons-cli, but it
> was never released with this mention upstream. IANAL but I can't see how an
> open source project can be released with this mention, if the license grants
> some fundamental rights you can't tell all the rights are reserved. The same
> mention appears in other java packages, but I'm not familiar with them.

It is a bug if the copyright language is not in sync with the one at upstream.

> - lintian seems to complain when the full license text is appended to
> debian/copyright. Some packages simply refer to the file in
> /usr/share/common-licenses/. Should this be generalized, or is this a topic
> still open for discussion?

This is generalized. The problem seems to be that Apache License
entered pretty late in the common-licenses folder (package base-files)
and the packages where lintian complains have not been updated since
then.


Onkar