I know this is not a pure-code question but I'm sure it must be interesting to most developers:
As a developer that works for a company I use third-party libraries (binaries) in my project. For instance, they are obtained from NuGet. I want to distribute my compiled project including the mentioned libraries in binary form. Often their license agreements say something like
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
Other sources such as BSD mention the term 'reproduce':
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution.
But how do I fulfill this requirement in practice from a technical perspective? What does including or reproducing actually mean here?
- Can I ignore it because this kind of text only applies to software in the source code form which shall make sure that the parts that contain the copyright notice are not removed from the source code or
- Do I really have to display the mentioned copyright notice somewhere to the user (e.g. as part of the installation routine) or
- Does it suffice to place the copyright notice in some file and simply ship it with the binaries without showing it to the user?
See example license agreement here