bcfg2 license?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, 2006-12-20 at 09:02 -0600, Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> On Wednesday 20 December 2006 06:29, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > Dennis Gilmore wrote:
> > > We have simple guidelines.  must be OSI or FSF approved.   If its not
> > > then its not acceptable
> >
> > That is not how I and many others read the guidelines, if its on one of
> > those 2 approved lists then its easy, but if it matches their guidelines
> > or the DFSG then its ok too. To quote the guidelines:
> > "We clarify an open source license in three ways:" Notice clarify,
> > nowhere the guidelines say the license must be on of those 3 lists!
> the three does not include DFSG  what debain does has zero impact on what we 
> do 

Agreed.

> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-76294f12c6b481792eb001ba9763d95e2792e825
> 
> says 
> 
> We clarify an open source license in three ways: 
>  OSI-approved license. You can find the list of OSI approved licenses here: 
> [WWW] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ 
>  GPL-Compatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: [WWW] 
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses 
>  GPL-Incompatible, Free Software Licenses. You can find the list here: [WWW] 
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses
>  
> followed in the guidelines by
> 
>  If the license of a package isn't covered in one of those lists, urge the 
> upstream maintainer to seek OSI-approval for their license here: [WWW] 
> http://www.opensource.org/docs/certification_mark.php#approval
> 
I read this much as Hans does.  Here are three lists that can
definitively define a license as free enough for us to distribute.  If
the license isn't on those lists you should urge upstream to seek
approval.  This is much like the license text criteria:

- SHOULD: If the source package does not include license text(s) as a
separate file from upstream, the packager SHOULD query upstream to
include it.

> > Take for example the short license which is on Crystal Stacker, which I
> > negotiated personally with the author from a freeware license with
> > abnoxious clauses:
> 
> >
> > A short 100% fine license, but according to you not acceptable, which is
> > very strange since it has been in FE for about a year now.
> Which i would not of allowed in as it is not using an approved license.   
> There is to be an audit license of Extras at some point in the new year.  at 
> that time anything not meeting our guidelines will need to be removed.
> 
When Core was audited, spot passed all ambiguous licenses to the FSF for
clarification.  They rendered judgment on the licenses and we either
kept or discarded the software accordingly.  So I doubt Crystal Stacker
would be outright discarded for not being on the FSF's list -- instead,
if we had any doubt we'd pass the license to them and they would clear
it as free software (or not, though I don't see anything that would make
Crystal Stacker non-free).

bcfg2 may be more problematic.  It certainly has people who are
defending and denying it.  It would probably be best for upstream to
submit their license to the FSF (or their revised license if they are
able to change it) so it can be looked at by the FSF lawyers.

-Toshio
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