[Fedora-legal-list] License propagation in Maven pom.xml hierarchy

[Stanislav Ochotnicky]

I would like guidance on propagation of licenses within Apache Maven pom.xml
files. Short introduction:

Maven pom.xml files specify project build process and various metadata. They
*can* contain licensing information embedded in a special <licenses> tag. We
package relatively a lot of simple pom packages (i.e. there's only the xml file
packaged + few fedora glue). Not all of these files are clearly licensed but
they almost always have parent pom.xml files (specified in <parent> tag). 

What I believe makes sense is that if the pom.xml file doesn't specify license,
we should assume the license is the same as parent pom. In any case the files
are relatively simple so they might not be even copyrightable (but better safe
than sorry). 

Can we get clearance for this or similar approach? Note that contacting
upstreams with these requests have mostly been fruitful with new projects, but
we have quite a few old things where they are long abandoned (but still used). 


-- 
Stanislav Ochotnicky <sochotnicky at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno

PGP: 7B087241
Red Hat Inc.                               http://cz.redhat.com