Fedora Board Recap 2007-JUL-10

[Luis Villa]

On 7/12/07, Luis Villa <luis at tieguy.org> wrote:
> [Note that this is not an official position of Red Hat Legal; I am not
> a lawyer (yet), and I am particularly not your lawyer (yet). Were I
> speaking as part of Red Hat Legal, I would speak with an @redhat.com
> address.]
>
> On 7/12/07, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at jdub.homelinux.org> wrote:
> > > == Brief discussion of GPL v2/v3 and EULA for F8 ==
> > >  * Consider adding license version tagging to spec file - push to FESCo
> > >  * Need to raise awareness to examine code coming from upstream during version updates
> > >  * Mostly packaging issues that need to be discussed with legal
> >
> > Can you explain this a bit more please?  Particularly if you're going to
> > push it to FESCo.
> >
> > 1) Why do we need to examine code coming from upstream updates?  (E.g.
> > only to make sure the license tag spells out the correct version?)
>
> Consider a not very hypothetical hypothetical: (the details of the
> incompatibility are simplified and possibly even incorrect, because I
> have been at the office *a lot* the past three days, but the basic
> idea is there)
>
> * Samba releases a library which is GPLv3. They are upstream for
> libsmbclient; it is their prerogative to do this.
>
> * Fedora packages and ships this new, GPL v3 libsmbclient.
>
> * Fedora rebuilds things which link against libsmbclient, but which
> are not GPL v3.
>
> * Fedora distributes. Voila... a (potential, depending on the details)
> license violation!
>
> Here, all relevant upstreams have done the right thing, and yet Fedora
> has committed a license violation. So Fedora might wish to put into
> place review procedures which minimize the risk of this occurring.

BTW, folks might want to take a look at the first question in :

http://gplv3.fsf.org/dd3-faq

to get a sense of GPL v3/v2 compatibility issues. I'm not completely
sure I personally agree with every square of the chart, but it at
least gives a good overview of where the likely problems are.

Luis