Consider slightly changing the license URL

[mbooth101]

At Eclipse Foundation we have some automated tools to fetch the licenses of our third-party dependencies and in some cases it uses the URL for the license that is given in the pom.xml file.

For example, in the mockito-core pom.xml [1] the following URL is given for the license:

https://github.com/mockito/mockito/blob/master/LICENSE

The problem is that this is a rich github page which contains all kinds of images and javascript and when our tooling downloads it, the result is a page containing other people's logos (possible copyright issue) and non functioning buttons and links.

Would you consider changing the URL to this:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mockito/mockito/master/LICENSE

That way you get only the license text without all the github cruft that currently surrounds it.

[1] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/mockito/mockito-core/2.23.0/mockito-core-2.23.0.pom

[TimvdLippe]

I am indifferent about this. The one requirement I have is that we are consistent with other projects. What notation do project like JUnit and Spring use?

[mbooth101]

JUnit and Spring projects actually go one step further and link to the license at a canonical source, e.g. EPL is published by Eclipse Foundation, so link to the Eclipse Foundation's copy of it. In the JUnit poms [1] they link directly to the Eclipse Foundation [2] and in the Spring poms [3] they link directly to the Apache Foundation [4]

I'm actually not sure if there is a canonical source for the MIT license, but there are other high-profile projects like ICU4j [3] that link directly into the license with the github raw URL as I am suggesting here for Mockito.

[1] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/junit/jupiter/junit-jupiter-api/5.3.1/junit-jupiter-api-5.3.1.pom
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v20.html
[3] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/springframework/spring-web/5.1.2.RELEASE/spring-web-5.1.2.RELEASE.pom
[4] http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
[5] https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/ibm/icu/icu4j/63.1/icu4j-63.1.pom

[mbooth101]

Looking around I also see that many projects link to the MIT license at opensource.org [1] and that would also be acceptible to me :-) It might also be the most consistent with other projects who are linking to licenses at canonical sources

[1] https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

[TimvdLippe]

Tweeted this out to ask for more information: https://twitter.com/TimvdLippe/status/1063501027624783873 If we can't find a consensus in the general Java community, we (the Mockito team) would probably just have to make a judgement call here. Thanks again for raising this issue!

[mockitoguy]

Let's do it. We have at least 1 user report that this change would be useful. I don't think changing it will break any known use case. @mbooth101, do you want to submit a PR?

[mbooth101]

Let's do it. We have at least 1 user report that this change would be useful. I don't think changing it will break any known use case. @mbooth101, do you want to submit a PR?

Hmm, I'm afraid I'm not familiar with gradle to know where this value is set. Please point me to the file I should change, or alternatively feel free to just make the change.

[mbooth101]

Hmm, so I cloned the source and tried to find where this license URL is set, but the only result I get when grepping the source is the readme file:

$ grep -r "mockito/blob/master/LICENSE"
README.md:[![Build Status](https://travis-ci.org/mockito/mockito.svg?branch=release/2.x)](https://travis-ci.org/mockito/mockito) [![Coverage Status](https://img.shields.io/codecov/c/github/mockito/mockito.svg)](https://codecov.io/github/mockito/mockito) [![MIT License](http://img.shields.io/badge/license-MIT-green.svg) ](https://github.com/mockito/mockito/blob/master/LICENSE)

@mockitoguy, any clues?

[TimvdLippe]

@mbooth101 This appears to be hard-coded at https://github.com/mockito/shipkit/blob/3a72e631874f245a837bb7396f382f3b4bac948d/subprojects/shipkit/src/main/groovy/org/shipkit/internal/gradle/util/PomCustomizer.java#L78-L81 Shipkit probably needs to be updated to either the new value, or allow it to be configured.

[dpursehouse]

This project doesn't seem to have a master branch any more, so the link in pom.xml results in 404 regardless of whether it's the raw URL or not.

[TimvdLippe]

@dpursehouse Good catch! Do you mind updating Shipkit to allow us to specify a different license location and then update Mockito with a Shipkit upgrade + configuration change?

[dpursehouse]

@TimvdLippe Sorry, I don't have time to look into that :(

[TimvdLippe]

If this is still necessary, we now configure it here:

mockito/gradle/java-publication.gradle

Line 68 in d894b54

url = 'https://github.com/mockito/mockito/blob/main/LICENSE'

[mbooth101]

It's been 4 years, I don't recall if this is still needed. Feel free to close.