NOTE: Please publicize any license changes to your packages

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/20/07, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> So, the new FESCo is going to act as the "Fedora License Police"

Always so negative.

I'd personally like to think of it more as a Licensing Neighborhood
Watch Program.  The goal here is to make sure that maintainers who are
depending on other packages such as libraries aren't blind-sided by a
licensing change that causes some sort of licensing violation.  Trust
me, we don't want to have to deal with a licensing problem after the
fact.  Nobody wants to end up in a situation where someone has to drop
the hammer and take a decisive corrective action to hot fix an
existing licensing problem.  We minimize the chance of such things by
communicating amongst ourselves as maintainers when licensing changes
occur.

At the end of the day all maintainers are responsible for knowing the
licensing issues surrounding the distribution and linking of the
packages they maintain.. but there's an incentive for everyone to be
neighborly and make sure that licensing changes for packages are being
communicated to other maintainers that need to know about it before
those changes enter into the common repository of software.

Unless as a community we are prepared to support narrowing what we
allow in to exactly one version of one license there is going to have
to be an in-house pro-active effort to watch for potential problems in
the license arena.  If you're not happy with FESCO playing the role of
'good cop' in this affair you might be significantly less thrilled
with my oscar worthy performance as 'bad cop.'

-jef"I shot a baby moose standing no futher than 6 feet away from me
in my yard yesterday. It shot it with a Nikon D200, through my front
window..several seconds after i peed my pants from the shock of
opening the window blinds to stare into the eyes of the large pony-ish
form in my yard"spaleta.