Copyright notices for JS libraries & licensing of Highcharts

[firai]

Description

• JS libraries are being bundled with NiceGui, but the repo seems to be missing respective copyright/license notices for the various libraries. Since most of the libraries are MIT-licensed, I understand that the copyright and license notices are required.
• NiceGui is MIT-licensed, but I understand that Highcharts is only free for non-commercial, testing or demonstration use¹². Since the Highcharts sources are being bundled with NiceGui, it seems like the Readme and/or docs should point out the difference in licensing and point the user to Highchart's licensing descriptions linked to above or the license notice in their repo.

Footnotes

1. https://www.highcharts.com/blog/download/ ↩

2. https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/highcharts#id-license ↩

[rodja]

You are right, @firai. Thanks for bringing this up. Could you create a pull request to fix this?

[firai]

I know of at least several ways of complying:

1. Put a single third-party notice in the root folder with all of the third party copyrights and licenses. I understand that this is the strategy that corporations tend to adopt (ref. VS Code). Since there aren't that many third party packages, manually compiling the notices may be the fastest. The only kink is that Highcharts is under a different license than everything else, so it may be wise to flag out which subfolder their notice applies to and perhaps throw another copy of their notice in the Highcharts subfolder.
2. (Variation of 1) Put the notices in Dependencies.md as part of the build process. However, this may make that document a bit messy. Furthermore, since packages don't uniformly include their licenses in the npm packages, this will likely require hardcoding links to Github to pull the licenses, and the links could (theoretically) be fragile. Same consideration for Highcharts as 1.
3. (Variation of 2) Put the respective licenses in the subfolders, and add a master notice in the root license to refer to the subfolders. Similar considerations as 2 regarding pulling the licenses "automatically".

Thoughts?

[rodja]

We already have the npm.py which fetches the libs according to npm.json. Maybe we can add the licence links to the json and let the py script build the Dependencies.md?

[falkoschindler]

PR #1747 adds license links to Dependencies.md. This should resolve this issue for now.