Dear Lazyweb,
What is the appropriate way to document the individual licenses of a fat jar (a jar archive that includes the program along with all its dependencies)?

I’ve been living in the happy world of Linux distributions, where one would just package the dependencies independently (or just specify which existing packages you use, actually, since most is already packaged by helpful other developers). But for the non-Linux people, a fat jar seems to be important so they can double-click it to run the application.

When building larger Java applications, you end up using a couple of external code such as various Apache Commons and Apache Batik. I’m currently including all their LICENSE.txt files in a directory named “legal”, and I’m trying to make it as obvious as possible which license applies to which parts of the jar archive. Is there any best-practice of doing this? I don’t want to reinvent the wheel; it’d also like to avoid any common legal pitfalls, obviously.

Feel free to respond either using the Disqus comment function or by email via erich () debian org