[Fedora-packaging] Licensing guidelines suggestions

[Ville Skyttä]

On Monday 06 August 2007, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 23:05 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Here's a few notes/questions that IMO need to be addressed in the new
> > licensing guidelines in Wiki.  IANAL, etc, but anyway, something for near
> > future FPC meetings (which I still probably won't be able to attend to
> > for a couple of weeks):
> >
> > 1) The licensing pages strongly imply that OSI-approved licenses are ok.
> > However for example the original Artistic license is OSI-approved but
> > listed in Wiki page as "bad".  Something needs real fixing - "ask
> > upstream to move to a "good" Artistic license" is IMO just a band aid.
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing
> > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php
>
> I think we're going to need the Fedora Board to decide this. Its a
> little outside of our jurisdiction, unfortunately.

Ok, I'll forward the question to fab-list, hopefully they'll pick this up.

[...]
> > 3) Source licenses are not the only thing that affect the distributables'
> > copyrights.  For example when something is built from let's say LGPLv2+
> > sources but linked with a GPLv2+ library, the resulting binary will be
> > GPLv2+, while the sources are still LGPLv2+ (unless their embedded
> > copyright notices are changed to GPLv2+, but that can't be done for many
> > *GPL licenses).

(Meant to say "... but that can't be done for many non-*GPL licenses.")

> > Suggested combined fix for 2) and 3) above: change the licensing
> > guidelines to prominently note something like that the value of the
> > License tag represents the copyright/license info of binary packages
> > only, and only when built in the configuration specified by the Fedora
> > build system, build
> > dependencies/conflicts in the specfile, and no non-Fedora software
> > installed that will affect the build in any way.  Source rpms' copyrights
> > are determined by the sources and other content included in them.
>
> This seems fine to me. I'll work on drafting a change for vote.

Thanks.  You can count me as +1 if the exact text to be voted on won't differ 
drastically from the above.