Licensing guidelines changes

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Thu Aug 2 20:34:21 UTC 2007


On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 22:27 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> > Today, FESCo ratified a new policy for handling the License tag inside
> > of package spec files.
> > 
> > You can read the new Licensing Guidelines here:
> > 
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/LicensingGuidelines
> > 
> > What does this mean for Fedora package maintainers? It means that you're
> > going to need to do a little bit of work. We want F8 packages to have
> > the correct license tag before we release F8.
> > 
> 
> Okay, 2 more questions:
> 
> 1: Currently the short for "zlib License" is just zlib. However most current 
> zlib licensed packages currently contain the following as License tag: 
> "zlib/libpng License" as that is what rpmlint wants. Changing all these tags 
> merely because someone thought zlib would be more descriptive feels very wrong. 
> I'm all for one standard for this. But why deviate from the table in rpmlint, a 
> tool long used for reviews, in cases where this isn't necessary. Also I believe 
> that no matter whats gets choisen as short form the long one should be 
> "zlib/libpng License" and not just "zlib License", as now a days its most often 
> refered to as the "zlib/libpng License" see for example:
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/zlib-license.php

We've actually fixed rpmlint to match the new license table. :)

I'll update the long name to be "zlib/libpng License".

> 2: Why aren't the ND variants of the CC licenses allowed for content?
> 
> Quoting from:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-8be956fd12dbe4ae927e65c989e7e83b9fcc0b80
> 'In this case, the gamedata files can be packaged and included in Fedora, as 
> long as the files meet the requirements for binary firmware.'
> 
> And then quoting from:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-adf31c383612aac313719f7b4f8167b7dcf245d2
> 'The License tag for any firmware that disallows modification should be set to: 
> "Redistributable, no modification permitted"'
> 
> On basis of this the Games SIG has long been reviewing and approving game 
> datafiles which lack permission to modify. Especially for for example music it 
> is quite common for the artist to say: "You may do with this as you want, but 
> you may not modify it, I made it and to me it is perfect as it is, so either 
> take it as it is, or leave it".

Its an oversight, I'll amend it now. Thanks for pointing that out.

~spot




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