I am building a web application that is deployable via WAR file, can I put 3rd party licenses in a folder, or must I display them in the application?

Question

The SmartGWT showcase examples only seem to include licenses in a folder (one copy of the appropriate license per 3rd party library). I was hoping I could do the same, but I want to make sure that is appropriate. Most of the licenses are Apache (1.1 or 2.0), and I have a couple LGPL and BSD 2-clause.

I have read the licenses, and I am unclear as to whether or not packaging the license text files inside the WAR is good enough, or if I need to actually display them in some way.

Answer 1

You only need to display licenses to the user, which require this explicitly. LGPL and BSD should not do that. But you are often required to do so, if you modify existing libraries. So unfortunately you have to dig through the licenses for the ones not using a standard type like Apache, GPL/LGPL or BSD.

If you really are unsure and want to give appropriate credit, I would implement kind of an about dialog, which shows the library names and the type of license. Optionally you could add a link to the license file to make it more convenient for the user.