Summary of the 2007-08-07 Packaging Committee meeting

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Wed Aug 8 17:36:35 UTC 2007


Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>  * Clarifying what the License: tag refers to (source or resulting
>    binary):
>   * http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/LicenseClarification
>   * There was plenty of interesting discussion here; it's a delicate
>     issue but the current tendency is to let License: refer to the
>     license on the source packages.
> 

Erm, can we word that as "let License: refer to the license of the parts of the 
sources used to build the binaries. IOW not any licenses inherited from 
libraries used"

This clarification is important to me because for example bochs contains a src 
file which is GPLv2 only, where as the rest is GPLv2+, but unless a configure 
option we don't use is passed, this GPLv2 only file isn't compiled in so the 
resulting binaries are GPLv2+.

Also the way it is phrased now, there us no use in doing sub-packages for 
different licensed parts as is currently adviced, since the sources as a whole 
are under the most restrictive license.

And even with the clarification, I'm not at all sure this is wise. I think it 
would be better to say that this practice is concidered OK, because a packager 
is not expected to trace all the licenses of all linked in libs (and their 
deps), but that if the packager knows that a more restrictive license from a 
lib makes the package itself more restrictively licensed then the package 
source license, that the packager then is encouraged to put in the more 
restrictive license?

This is esp important for libs, so that people can check license issues with 
libs, without having to walk the entire dep chain.

For example I've just split of the id3tag plugin for imlib2 into its own 
subpackage because libid3tag is GPL licensed, whereas imlib and its other deps 
are MIT/BSD (ish), and I've used GPLv2+ as License: field for this subpackage.

Regards,

Hans




More information about the Fedora-maintainers mailing list