Fedora Board Recap 2007-JUL-10

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Jul 12, 2007, Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> Whether it is worth the effort to separate the license tags in RPM
> between GPLv2 and GPLv3 licensed software from the legal perspective.

Suggestions to avoid trouble: automate as much checking as possible.

New top-of-tree and new builds with License: GPL should be flagged and
the maintainer should be asked to replace that with one of GPLv2,
GPLv3, GPLv2+, GPLv3+, and perhaps other combinations thereof.
Likewise for LGPL.

New builds that change licensing terms should check any library
dependencies for license incompatibility.  E.g., a GPLv2 program must
not depend on a GPLv3+ or LGPLv3+ library, and a GPLv3+ program must
not depend on a GPLv2 library.  (not sure about GPLv3+ / LGPLv2
compatibility, I haven't thought much about it, and IANAL :-)

New builds containing libraries should check any dependent packages
for license incompatibility similarly.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
FSF Latin America Board Member         http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}