[Fedora-packaging] License Tag Draft

[Panu Matilainen]

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Tom \spot\ Callaway wrote:
>
> On Fri, 2007-07-27 at 05:51 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On Thu, 2007-07-26 at 18:27 -0500, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>>> OK, I know this is going to be painful, but we need to solve this (FESCo
>>> is waiting for us to do it), and I think this is the cleanest way:
>>>
>>> Please review: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/LicenseTag
>>> and http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing .
>>>
>>> We'll vote on it next week.
>>
>> -1
>>
>> As I understand it, you are trying mandate versioned license tags.
>> Such an approach is inapplicable without a "license tags" register being
>> actively maintained by an "licence tag administration office".
>>
>> In other words, to me your proposal is equivalent to mandating cars
>> carring license tags but allowing car owner to "paint them themselves".
>
> Ralf, there really isn't any other way to solve the problem without
> having a list of standard license identifiers.
>
> The http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing page is the license
> registry. I'm volunteering to lead the effort to maintain it, since I've
> effectively been doing that for more than a year now.
>
> I'm more than willing to take on additional helpers to maintain this
> license registry. I'm very willing to alter the license identifiers to
> make they more simplistic, but without that baseline standard, it won't
> be possible to predictably track license data from packages.

<utopia>

Make the wiki-list a real license compatibility matrix, stored in a 
machine parsable format. Put the matrix into (fedora-)license-matrix (or such) 
package that contains the actual copy of known license text and require 
that anything claiming to be of license foo has a license file matching 
the checksum of the license-matrix copy of that license. Enforce this at 
build time so that no package with unknown (or incompatible) license can 
enter the repository.

It'd probably need some additional help from rpm to map the license 
tag and actual file (while it's often "COPYING" it also often is not, not 
to mention various homegrown licenses). Something like
License(<short name>): <path to file>

</utopia>

Back to scheduled morning coffee break...

 	- Panu -