[Fedora-packaging] Re: Revived License: tag proposal

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 14 Dec 2006 11:49:16 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
> >>>>> "MC" == Matej Cepl <ceplm at seznam.cz> writes:
>
> MC> On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:11:11 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III scripst:
>
> >> I have not attempted to pick a list of those common licenses,
> >> although I have provided some data on what License: tags are in
> >> use.
>
> MC> Certainly I am missing in the list my preferred (and very common)
> MC> MIT/X license.
>
> Well, two issues here:
>
> As I wrote in the text you quoted, I wasn't attempting to provide an
> exhaustive list of licenses to be standardized; I only listed a few
> examples so that I could get feedback on the proposal itself first and
> work on the complete list of tags afterwords.  Unfortunately so far
> the only comments I've received has been about tags that are missing
> form the examples.  So the only thing you should infer from the
> purposefully incomplete random list of examples is that it's
> incomplete.

Comments:

A) Thankyou very much for continuing on this. I made a list for FC-6
and could not get back to it because of job changes

B) One should distinguish v1 and v2 of the GPL. The changes if I
remember were rather important. I don't know of any code though under
v1.

C) There are multiple versions of the LGPL. I do not remember the
differences between renaming it from Library GPL to Lesser GPL.

D) I would go for a standardization as the following:

Name of license, Version of license, File(s) to see details.

BSD, Original, See /usr/share/licenses/BSD.Original
BSD, Updated, See /usr/share/licenses/BSD.Updated
Multiple, See /usr/share/<package-name>/licenses/
GPL, v1, See /usr/share/licenses/GPL.v1.0

There could be a package called Fedora-Recognized-Licenses-1.0 that
installs most of the ones that are considered matching the purpose of
the project. It should not be a grab-bag of every license the OSI said
was ok.. but the core ones that Fedora considers to be good examples
of the central values of  Liberty,  Equality, and Justice. All other
licenses would be required to be placed in the
/usr/share/package-name/licenses directory.



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"