#57: Seeking Council feedback/input on draft third party software policy -------------------------+--------------------- Reporter: pfrields | Owner: Status: new | Priority: normal Component: General | Resolution: Keywords: workstation | -------------------------+--------------------- Comment (by spot): Replying to [comment:21 rhughes]: > Replying to [comment:19 mattdm]: > > The use of SPDX resources for license tags is an example; they mean something different than Fedora does when we use "License: MIT". > > Okay, this might be a concrete issue. The AppStream specification explicitly specifies SPDX (and is shipped in AppStream and specified by AppData files) as it's designed to be used by multiple distributions and has already been adopted natively by both Debian and Suse. Being blunt, although Fedora did a lot of "picking apart" of the license issues back in the day, we can't base a freedesktop spec on the specific wording of how Fedora Legal interprets specific parts of a license text. If SPDX and Fedora disagree on the meaning of MIT we should probably fix that. *deep breath* Boy, that'd be nice. I'm not sure it is ever going to happen. We've got different philosophies. Take a look at the MIT subsection at Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:MIT It begins with this text: "There are many MIT variants, all of which are functionally identical." SPDX disagrees. They think that any wording change in a license, no matter how trivial, results in a new license. Fedora decided a long time ago that all of these MIT variants, as long as they resulted in the same basic set of permissions/restrictions, would be called "MIT". I've been talking to the SPDX project team since they formed, and we long ago determined to simply agree to disagree here. Fedora calls all 33 (known) MIT variants "MIT", and SPDX only calls the one MIT entry from the OSI list as "MIT" (and doesn't have a classification for the other 32 variants). > Upstream is now specifying the license as an SPDX string in the AppData file, and we're showing that in preference to the license specified in the spec file. If that needs to change then we're going to need pages like https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0 specifically for Fedora license IDs, and we're also going to need an explicit grammar for the License: line in the spec file -- at the moment lots of packages are just specifying case- incorrect text not designed for machine reading. Citation needed on "lots of packages". We also have an explicit grammar for the License: line. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines That said, I _do_ understand why you're using SPDX strings in the AppData files. SPDX (with my help) has been putting in significant effort to ensure that the majority of Fedora licenses have matching SPDX entries. MIT is an exception, rather than the rule. I'm not concerned about how you are currently using SPDX resources in this context. -- Ticket URL: <https://fedorahosted.org/council/ticket/57#comment:24> council <https://fedorahosted.org/council> Fedora Council Public Tickets _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.
