Separating licensing policy from packaging guidelines

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi


The packaging committee has clearly defined their role as taking care of 
how software is being packaged in Fedora and not what is being packaged. 
  What is being packaged is defined by our legal policies which are 
currently intermixed in different sections along with the packaging 
guidelines. Several third party repositories have started relying on the 
Fedora Packaging guidelines but deviate in their licensing policies.

Over a period of time, there are a number of clarifications that might 
required. Richard M Stallman has pointed out that our guidelines 
currently either Free software as defined by FSF and Open source 
software as defined by OSI to be included in Fedora. Some of the OSI 
certified Open Source licenses are considered non-free by FSF. We need 
to consider whether we want to slightly change the guidelines to require 
both Free and Open Source licenses or just Free software licenses. Brett 
Smith from FSF in a offline discussion pointed that we don't explicitly 
define the licensing for documentation. We need to make that clear. 
Alexandre Oliva has pointed out that we don't explicitly promise to 
provide source code to end users. I think that's a good thing to clarify 
too.

Splitting up the legal policies from the packaging guidelines in helpful 
to define the role of Fedora Packaging Committee better and enable 
different repositories to reuse the packaging guidelines in a easier way 
  Note that I did ask FESCo to look into that and don't think any 
changes were discussed.

Does this splitting up the legal section into a separate policy document 
managed by Fedora Project Board sense to folks here? I can present a draft.

Rahul