Fetching of the license file from relative path

[rozyczko]

Description

Added relative path to the correct license file to be used in the Windows installer.

Fixes #3477

How Has This Been Tested?

Local test on GH built installer.

Review Checklist:

[if using the editor, use [x] in place of [ ] to check a box]

Documentation (check at least one)

• There is nothing that needs documenting
• Documentation changes are in this PR
• There is an issue open for the documentation (link?)

Installers

• There is a chance this will affect the installers, if so
  • Windows installer (GH artifact) has been tested (installed and worked)
  • MacOSX installer (GH artifact) has been tested (installed and worked)
  • Wheels installer (GH artifact) has been tested (installed and worked)

Licensing (untick if necessary)

• The introduced changes comply with SasView license (BSD 3-Clause)

[llimeht]

I'm not sure this actually fixes #3477 in a desirable way.

• There is actually no need for the licence of sasview to be shown as a click-through in the installer - it's not a requirement to accept this licence to use the software. It's not a requirement to show the licence in the installer; it should, however, be visible at runtime (e.g. Help > About).
• The text that is currently shown is a request that the user acknowledge sasview in publications, which is a different thing entirely. Is there consensus to drop the request for attribution?
• This doesn't fix the application on macos - it has the same problem of not having the sasview licence in the bundle.
• If this is the desired solution, shouldn't other uses of installers/license.txt also get updated and the file deleted?

[rozyczko]

• There is actually no need for the licence of sasview to be shown as a click-through in the installer - it's not a requirement to accept this licence to use the software. It's not a requirement to show the licence in the installer; it should, however, be visible at runtime (e.g. Help > About).

I think some of the points in the License do apply to the binary distribution, so the click-through should be there.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS"

• This doesn't fix the application on macos - it has the same problem of not having the sasview licence in the bundle.

This is a windows specific fix, as brought up in #3477

• If this is the desired solution, shouldn't other uses of installers/license.txt also get updated and the file deleted?

Yes, the file should be removed.

[jamescrake-merani]

@llimeht I'm not sure I agree. We have the licence in the documentation but there's no harm on having it in the installer too. It seems Git on Windows also shows the GPL, so I don't think this is unusual.

I've verified this works on my Windows desktop so I'm approving. You may want to remove the licence file in this PR before merging, or in a separate one.

Also I noticed that some files have this on the header:

"""
This software was developed by the University of Tennessee as part of the
Distributed Data Analysis of Neutron Scattering Experiments (DANSE)
project funded by the US National Science Foundation. 

See the license text in license.txt

copyright 2010, University of Tennessee

We should probably update this. But also, I'm not even sure if its necessary to keep this header at all. But that's probably a separate discussion to have.

[llimeht]

It's permitted to show the licence but it is absolutely not required. The only thing that is required is that the binary distribution have a copy of the licence which is what §2 of the licence says. It's a happily settled piece of free software legalese that the user is not required to click-through the licence; indeed the user is actually not even required to accept the licence as the licence controls distribution not usage.

(and note that sasview wasn't even carrying a copy of its own licence... in violation of its own licence... until #3480)

I still think 2 changes are required here:

• the request to give attribution to sasview was the most important part of the message in the windows installer and that is now lost - this needs to come back.
• installers/license.txt is also used in build_tools/release_automation.py which needs fixing.

[rozyczko]

• the request to give attribution to sasview was the most important part of the message in the windows installer and that is now lost - this needs to come back.

Should we then add this to the main LICENSE.TXT?

4. If you use this application to do scientific research that leads to publication, we kindly ask that you acknowledge the use of the software with the following sentence:
"This work benefited from the use of the SasView application, originally developed under NSF award DMR-0520547."

But, we already have the acknowledgement request with proper wording (more text) in the Acknowledging SasView dialog.
Is it necessary to include this in the main license file?

@butlerpd ?

[llimeht]

Should we then add this to the main LICENSE.TXT?

Adding it as a request outside of the legal licence text is ok.

Adding it to the actual licence text is a hard "no". (a) we absolutely should not try inventing new licences (I've seen this enough times, it always ends badly), and (b) a licence change would need legal sign-off from every single copyright holder (either the individual or the institution, depending on their circumstances).

I think it's also worth taking a step back on this whole PR. What actual problem are we trying to fix here? I don't believe there's actually a bug to fix (and if there is one, then it needs to be fixed everywhere, not only in the windows installer, and that means fixing it in the UI)

[rozyczko]

The point is to have consistent licensing text in both the installer display window and inside the app.
This PR fixes the issue.
The acknowledgement text is a separate - we already have a UI dialog for it.
Do we need users to explicitly agree to the acknowledgment request during the installation?
Since we don't want to modify the license text, which you are right about, we would need to add another click-through.
This makes even less sense.

I would propose to merge this as-is, since it fixes the obvious issue of having different license wording between the two locations.

Acknowledgements can be resolved at some other point.

[llimeht]

The point is to have consistent licensing text in both the installer display window and inside the app. This PR fixes the issue.

If the installer displayed a difference licence to what sasview was actually released under then that would be an issue. However, that's not the case.

The installer does not currently display any licence text - it's not that it's inconsistent, it doesn't do it at all, and that's ok.

The acknowledgement text is a separate

No, this PR creates the issue with the acknowledgement text, while not fixing a problem that I really don't think exists.

we would need to add another click-through.

No, as an alternative, we could not merge this PR, and then that wouldn't be needed.

I would propose to merge this as-is, since it fixes the obvious issue of having different license wording between the two locations.

There isn't different licence text in two locations. There is the licence text in the source & documentation, and a request for acknowledgement in the Windows installer. That's self-consistent and OK, while this PR creates problems that then need to be fixed. If we really wanted we could add the licence text to that request for acknowledgement, (but it's not needed, it's just clutter).

The only inconsistency is that the file in git is called installers/license.txt and it could be renamed to anything else we want if that is confusing. Perhaps just git mv installers/license.txt installers/acknowledgement.txt instead?

[krzywon]

Reading through this PR, I think @llimeht makes some very good points on licensing and what is displayed on install. I would suggest this be part of the discussion for the biweekly call to be sure this is what we want to do.

[jamescrake-merani]

As there hasn't been an agreement on this PR yet, I am not going to merge it for 6.1.1. We will need to have further discussions about this post-release.

[butlerpd]

This was discussed at today's fortnightly meeting. This remains as an approved PR though supposedly discussion was ongoing up till August? However nobody on the call could remember the issues. There was also some suggestion that the original concern of the license not being in the bundle was resolved elsewhere already?

Based on this no action was taken. However it is noted that we should finalize that discussion so that PRs don't get left hanging indefinitely.

[llimeht]

@butlerpd, This PR is a request to change the way SasView presents itself to new users. It is deleting the request for acknowledgements from the installer and instead showing the licence text. We might very well want to make that swap (I doubt it) but that is something to be discussed as a proposed change in policy (for want of a better word), not done by accident in a PR. There is no technical or legal bug being fixed by this PR.

If having the request for acks in a file called "license.txt" is problematic then we can do llimeht@9727234

In answer to your approved-but-not-merged observation, if there were a "disapprove" button I'd use it here, but fortunately there is not :)