Fedora Extras License Audit

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 01:54 +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2007 at 03:16:24PM -0600, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:
> > As part of our ongoing committment to Open Source, Fedora Extras is
> > undergoing a license audit of the packages contained within it. We do
> > this for several reasons:
> > 
> > 1. To ensure that we don't have any packages containing licenses that do
> > not meet the Fedora licensing standards.
> 
> I take that opportunity to ask a few questions for cases that seem
> unclear to me.
> 
> Do we consider files with copyright or a mention of an author and no 
> license to be problematic, or to be covered by the main license (if such
> a thing exists)? 

Yes. In those cases, we're noting that the license is not listed in the
source code, and we'll be informing upstream of this, and suggesting
that they correct this.

> Files copyrighted, but without license should be 
> considered to be under a restrictive license (no modification nor 
> redistribution). However, when the remaining of the package is 
> consistently under a given license and the authors are the same I
> consider that the notice is missing, but that the main license cover the 
> files. Is it right?

This is almost certainly the intent of the upstream author, who probably
thinks it is sufficient to either just say "This code is GPL" or dump a
copy of COPYING in the top-level buildroot. Is that legally sufficient?
Its a gray area. We'd much rather have them include the license in at
least some part of the source code, or have the source code say
something like

/* This code is under the GPL, see full text of license in COPYING. */

> Do we consider files with incomplete license notice (when a complete
> notice exists, like for the GPL) to be problematic?

Problematic, yes. Cause for removal from Fedora? No.

~spot