NOTE: Please publicize any license changes to your packages

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

On 22.07.2007 16:50, seth vidal wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-07-21 at 14:52 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Sat, 21 Jul 2007 09:36:34 +0200
>> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 22:32 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>> Well, why should I change my opinion on something which had been
>>> repeatedly discussed to death (E.g. on FPC meetings) and which I
>>> consider to be "silly and naive"?
>>>
>>> Seems to me as if any new FESCo is going to commit the same beginner's
>>> mistakes others had been trapped into before.
>> I'd like to point out this mandate came from the Board.  FESCo did not
>> start this on their own, they were told to do it.
> 
> A couple of more items on this decision:
> 
> 1. we're not looking for things to be programming-api-perfect when it
> comes to license specification in the License: tag.
> 2. We want to make it easier to do a global query to look for certain
> things:
>    ie: license X Requires a package which is license Y - these two are
> incompatible and we need to deal with that.
> 
> Now, we're not expecting perfection, but it should be started.

/me can see the reasons for kind of GPL2, GPL2+, LGPL2+ stuff in the
license tag as well

But what I'd like to see added at the same time are some automatic check
to make sure properly done license changes get noticed automatically. A
basic "sha1sum the LICENSE file from upstream (most ship one) once and
put a small script into the %pre section that compares the know sha1sum
with the current one from the tarball and aborts if something changed"
should find properly done license changes automatically and keeps load
off the maintainer.

Sure, in an ideal world all maintainers would notice a license change by
reading the changelog or when interacting with upstream -- but we don't
live in and ideal world afaics and computers are made for such automatic
checks, so why not use them for what they were made?

Just my 2 cent.


Cu
thl