[🚀 Feature]: Include LICENSE and copyright NOTICE inside all packages and binary releases

[joerg1985]

Description

In my mind it is good practice to deploy the LICENSE and NOTICE files inside the binaries to ensure the "4. Redistribution." section of the LICENSE file is fulfilled. A lot of project are doing so, e.g. JUnit, opentest4j, Johnzon, ... just look at the "META-INF" folder of the jars.

This approach might be applied to the none jar binaries too e.g. the selenium-manager or other language bindings.

Have you considered any alternatives or workarounds?

Deploy the files myself.

[selenium-ci]

@joerg1985, thank you for creating this issue. We will troubleshoot it as soon as we can.

Selenium Triage Team: remember to follow the Triage Guide

[cgoldberg]

This is a good idea, and is also mandated by the Apache 2.0 license (sections 4a and 4d). We should include the LICENSE (license text) and NOTICE (copyright notices) in all assets we distribute.

selenium-manager

Since we distribute the binary directly... we should make license/copyright info available via command line option (add it to either --help or --version). Including links instead of the full text would be fine.

I don't know about other bindings, but Python already includes LICENSE in both of our distribution packages (wheel/sdist). I will create a PR to include NOTICE.

Also, we use a lot of 3rd party code. All of it contains copyright/license information in the source files, but I'm not sure if we should also include this information in our NOTICE file for distribution.

[cgoldberg]

This should now be included in our Python packages (see #16114). It would be great if all other bindings/components added this.

[selenium-ci]

This issue is looking for contributors.

Please comment below or reach out to us through our IRC/Slack/Matrix channels if you are interested.

[Delta456]

I will get to add this in Java binding.

[Kunal0811]

Thank you for raising this! I agree that including the LICENSE and NOTICE files inside all Selenium packages and binaries is important for compliance with the license’s redistribution terms.

Embedding these files in the META-INF folder of JARs is a well-established practice, and extending this to non-JAR binaries like selenium-manager and language bindings makes a lot of sense.

If helpful, I can assist with drafting the necessary build script updates or packaging changes to automate inclusion of these files across Selenium’s various components.

Looking forward to seeing this improvement move forward!