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ning / compress

High-performance, streaming/chunking Java LZF codec, compatible with standard C LZF package
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Added license and copyright information. #33

Closed willb closed 3 years ago

willb commented 11 years ago

Files that did not have license or copyright information now do. Also, the text of the Apache license is included in the source tree.

This will make it easier for people who want to use or redistribute compress to comply with its license; thanks for taking a look.

cowtowncoder commented 11 years ago

Um, have I mentioned that I strongly dislike inclusion of boilerplate comments in source code? :-) So I do not want to add either license or copyright comments included. (as a sidenote: copyright is not by Ning even though repo is under Ning; it is by authors, mostly me, bits by others), This is why it is more convenient to add it into separate file that explains details. It may be necessary to include some form of authorship information for specific contributions.

But addition of Apache LICENSE and NOTICE in repo and resulting jars would be welcome addition (if they aren't there yet). Same goes for other external files and inclusion. My aversion is limited to adding legalese in source files.

Any chance you could do pull request for smaller set of changes like that?

willb commented 11 years ago

Thanks for the quick reply! I understand the desire to limit boilerplate comments in code, but there are substantial advantages to including copyright and license information in each source file, especially for published open-source projects where some components may be reused independently of the whole. (And, in this case, the only copyright notice in the repository attributed copyright to Ning, not to the authors -- so there was no way for me or any other observer to know who held the copyright if not Ning.) Doing so protects the authors and makes things far easier for downstream packagers and people who are interested in making other derivative works.

Would you be averse to a shorter comment at the beginning of each file? A two-line comment could include both copyright/authorship information and a pointer to the text of the Apache license; this seems like it would both provide useful information to packagers and users and minimally impact the aesthetics of your source files. If that would work for you, I can put together a pull request that has such comments (as well as Apache LICENSE and NOTICE files).

cowtowncoder commented 11 years ago

I would be much less averse to compact header. Although the case could be made that whenever re-purposing code in other places, such notice could be added by recycling entity. :)

So if a two-liner (etc) would refer to another shared file that contains details of copyright (I really don't want to contain replication of that), mention Apache License, that would be fine.

I also went ahead and checked whether artifacts had proper pieces included; they didn't. So I added simple LICENSE and NOTICE files, which should be there.