qos-ch / slf4j

Simple Logging Facade for Java
http://www.slf4j.org
MIT License
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license url (in POM) pointing to the generic license instead of actual license #381

Open wildcart opened 8 months ago

wildcart commented 8 months ago

While evaluating the License Maven Plugin to manage/download dependency licenses, I noticed that it does not download the 'correct' license for SLF4J. It does download a copy of the MIT license but the downloaded copy includes a generic copyright notice compared to a specific SLF4J copyright notice:

- Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>
+ Copyright (c) 2004-2023 QOS.ch

The plugin downloads the license referenced in <license><url> in the project's main POM. In this case, the specified URL points to the generic copy of the MIT license hosted at opensource.org: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php. Project Lombok, for example, points to its custom copy of the MIT license (which also includes the license of each dependency), instead:

<license>
    <name>The MIT License</name>
    <url>https://projectlombok.org/LICENSE</url>
    <distribution>repo</distribution>
</license>

Now I am wondering if it is an oversight to not point to SLF4J's specific copy of the MIT license?

Please notice, I deliberately ignore the discussion, if the MIT license actually requires projects depending on an MIT licensed dependency to bundle a copy of that license: Including a copy of the license does not break the license while not including it may.

Thanks for considering and please feel free to simply close this ticket, if you do not consider this an issue as grabbing a copy of the license and manually bundling it with our project(s) is simple.


Also, I've noticed that some of the sub modules in this project include license files with different a copyright notice. For example the copyright notice of the jul-to-slf4j sub module reads Copyright (c) 2004-2022 QOS.ch Sarl (Switzerland), which would require that sub module's POM to override <license><url> to point to its own license file, if the above is considered an issue.