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

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(a)redhat.com&gt; Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno PGP: 7B087241 Red Hat Inc. http://cz.redhat.com