Enhancement
Many FOSS licenses require that users are
- be made aware of the license of the software used (EPL-2.0)
- the license text of the used software is handed over (Apache-2.0)
- the source code of the software used is made available on request and reference is made to it (EPL-2.0)
- copyright information is made available (BSD 3-Clause)
- Warranty disclaimers of the original authors are provided/displayed (BSD 3-Clause)
The current "license overview" does not do justice to this sufficiently:
- The view is only accessible to an administrative user
- The view does not provide copyright information and warranty disclaimers
- The view only provides an external link to the license - so it is not provided with the software.
- There is no indication/offer of source code delivery
- The view does not provide license information for the TopLogic modules themselves.
Improvement
- Dialog for all users in the user menu or side bar
- Per library used
- Supplying a document with license text, the copyright notice and warranty disclaimers
- Download option of the license information from the application (not from external)
What needs to be clarified is how we could ensure that we could still deliver the source code of the libraries used even if the official repository of the library was no longer accessible.
The simplest option would be to bundle the source code with the application itself - "supplying the source code" - but this unnecessarily inflates the software archive. At a minimum, we would need to ensure that the source code ends up in our Nexus repository mirror, and from there in a backup from which delivery on demand would at least theoretically be possible.
Test
- Call up the license overview in the user menu.