About a year ago Haïkel Guemar started a thread[1] on devel@ and legal@ about adopting SPDX (I think he meant the entirety of the SPDX specification and not just the SPDX license identifiers). I'd like to propose reconsideration of replacement of the existing Fedora license tag scheme with the SPDX license identifiers. I've been mildly critical of SPDX on, frankly, mostly political and aesthetic grounds (to the point of asserting that the SPDX identifiers represent a form of cultural imperialism). I've complained about and lamented the apparent rising influence of the SPDX identifiers (based on the number of instances in recent years of people making non-ironic references in normal discourse to things like "Apache 2" [which I assume derives from SPDX's Apache-2.0, for what we all used to call the Apache License except for those who insist on calling it "ASL"] and "BSD-2-Clause" [for what was once rightly called the 2-clause BSD license]). Nevertheless, I am starting to think that the venerable Fedora license tag system has outlived its usefulness. The main annoyance is not the abbreviations themselves, which I find quite charming overall, but the degree to which a single abbreviation can refer to a potentially large set of what I'd think of as substantively different license texts. The SPDX identifiers are not a perfect solution since there are so many distinct license texts encountered in Fedora which are not currently the subject of an SPDX short identifier and are not likely ever to be. But I could envision a Fedora extension to the SPDX identifiers. Then again, maybe my suspicion that there could be some benefit to rebasing off the SPDX identifiers is not well informed. As an aside, I detect that in a lot of discussion of the topic of SPDX identifiers there is a sort of "standardization is always good, no matter the cost" bias at work, and for better or worse I think I am immune to that bias. In full candor, I imagine the benefits to Fedora itself of using SPDX identifiers are likely quite low, and so perhaps not worth the disruption of switching. I do see some potential benefit for Red Hat as a downstream commercial inheritor of Fedora packages. So, any thoughts on this? What's the right forum in which to raise this issue? (I'm only raising it here since Haïkel did so last year and it's the only arguably on-topic Fedora mailing list I'm already subscribed to). This is not a suggestion to adopt the SPDX specification in any broader sense. I don't really have a well-informed non-political view of it other than to observe that it seems to be mainly of interest to a narrow group of enthusiasts at present and also it seems like it would be highly impractical and pointless for Fedora to consider such a thing. Richard [1] http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-legal/msg02633.html _______________________________________________ legal mailing list legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
