JupyterLab Licenses

Work-in-progress repo for license reporting for JupyterLab 3.1.

The Work

Work is proceeding on issues and PRs in two repos:

• jupyterlab
  • jupyterlab/jupyterlab#9779
• jupyterlab_server
  • jupyterlab/jupyterlab_server#160
  • jupyterlab/jupyterlab_server#161

The Problem

Historically, the pre-built JupyterLab shipped to pypi contained a large webpack build of hundreds of first- and third-party libraries, without any sort of licenses attribution.

With federated modules, every JupyterLab extension constitutes a unique distribution, which means this concern is shared by more parties.

The Setup

license-webpack-plugin is the only game in town for correctly capturing the licenses of all packages included in a build. Initial work enabled this plugin, but encountered a number of issues with federated modules. These have since been fixed.

Further, the initial PR didn't actually offer the licenses to the user.

In discussion with a number of parties, it became clear a number of tools are needed, both at the CLI and in the web UI. Additionally, these license compliance tools will be uniquely interesting to downstream applications that remix JupyterLab core components, and their upstreams.

The Proposal

• offer a /lab/api/licenses API endpoint
• offer a jupyter lab licenses CLI
• offer a Help » Licenses UI