Re: wsdl test files and licensing

[Alex Harsanyi]

2014-11-12 20:47 GMT+08:00 David Kastrup <address@hidden>:

Michael Albinus <address@hidden> writes:

> the soap-client people have written a test suite shich is obviously
> useful. I would like to merge it into Emacs. This will take time,
> because before this happens it shall use ert for running the
> tests. But that's another story.
>
> As test data, there are several *.wsdl files as well as soap request
> examples (these are *.xml files). All of them are not licensed, except
> Debbugs.wsdl taken from the GNU ELPA debbugs package.

What does "are not licensed" mean?  If it means "there is no license to
distribute them", obviously we cannot distribute them.  That's a
no-brainer.

I will try to clarify what the situation is:

Each SOAP server provides a WSDL document which contains the definition of the messages and their XML structure as accepted by the server.  soap-client.el (and other soap-clients) read this document and use it to generate the XML requests and process the XML replies from the server.   While the WSDL itself is XML format, it is intended to be read by computers, not humans (quite often, the documents are also generated automatically from programing language interfaces).  These WSDL documents are available to be downloaded from the SOAP servers themselves and are necessary to be able to communicate with these servers.

We have a test suite which has about 11 WSDL documents from different providers saved locally.  They are used to ensure that soap-client.el can parse real-world WSDL documents.  None of these documents have any copyright notice on them, except for Debbugs.wsdl and another one which has an "All Rights Reserved" notice.

I wasn't sure if these documents can be distributed at all, so I kept the test suite private, instead of adding it to the public repository which hosts soap-client.el.  Michael suggested we ask for clarification on emacs-devel, which he did :-)

Best Regards,

Alex.