Alexandre Oliva wrote:
In our packaging guidelines http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-76294f12c6b481792eb001ba9763d95e2792e825 we state: The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. In accordance with that, all packages included in Fedora must be covered under an open source license. We clarify an open source license in three ways: [...] Drawing a line on licensing requirements is good, but I've recently realized (see below) that this is not quite enough to ensure that Fedora users aren't misled into loss of freedom by the Fedora project itself. Consider a Free Software package licensed under a permissive license, such as the MIT license. Consider that someone makes changes to the program and releases the whole under the same license, but refrains from publishing the corresponding sources. Is this modified package eligible for inclusion in Fedora? It certainly is under a Free Software license, but it certainly isn't Free Software any more. This is not a theoretical situation. For the past month, I've been working on code that was mostly Free Software, but whose integrator had refrained from publishing corresponding sources of included Free Software packages, even the LGPLed ones. Not the only kind of license infringement in that package, mind you. They even licensed their *own* code under the LGPL, but they didn't publish the corresponding source code either (which AFAIK is not a license violation AFAIK, but IANAL) A few more details at http://www.fsfla.org/?q=en/node/157 An upcoming article will cover it in far more detail. Anyhow, the point is that it's not enough for there to be an applicable license that is a Free Software license (or "open source license", per the definition in the Fedora packaging guidelines). It would be better to state that the software, as distributed by the Fedora project, must abide by the Free Software definition and (or?) the Open-Source Software definition. Perhaps it would make sense to also add a note explaining that Fedora is committed to not distributing [non-firmware] software in such a way that the software wouldn't abide by these definitions, from the point of view of the recipients. E.g. software licensed under a Free Software license but without corresponding sources. If the reader finds deviations s/he should report them. Makes sense?
Doesn't http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-c23c2cd3782be842dc7ab40c35199c07cfbfe347 already cover all that?
Rahul _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
