On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 3:16 AM Jason Tibbitts <tibbs@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > One of the various reasons for having package reviews is having a human > verify that the packager's choice of License: tag is valid. The > Packaging Committee is was faced with a request > (https://pagure.io/packaging-committee/issue/1007) that has us > questioning just how much license review is required. > > Are any of the following acceptable? > > 1) Trust the packager to do a license review, with no reviewer > verification. It seems like two different things may be getting conflated here: 1. Review of a package to determine whether it satisfies Fedora licensing policy. 2. Choice of what to put for the License: tag -- assuming 1 has been done. I don't have a view on whether the existing approach of having a human reviewer is absolutely needed. However, a general point I'd make is that Red Hat has been assuming a certain level of very high quality in community legal review of new Fedora packages -- this assumption is baked into certain internal processes we have at Red Hat for RHEL -- and the additional human review probably contributes to this. If we relax some elements of Fedora legal review perhaps we'll need to introduce others to compensate for this, whether on the Fedora side or the RHEL side, or both. On the other hand, that observation doesn't really apply to the License: tags themselves. I would say we (or I, anyway) don't really find the Fedora License: tags that helpful to begin with because they are generally not super-accurate (by my own standards, at least) and there seems to be substantial inconsistency in how they are selected across different packages and reviewers/maintainers. > 2) Trust the output of an automated tool which attempts to detect > project licenses (such as askalono). In general, license scanning tools are pretty bad, probably unavoidably so, since there are limits to how much you can automate license detection. The best or least bad one, and the only one I would personally vouch for, is ScanCode (mentioned by David Cantrell in his response). I would encourage Fedora to consider some sort of formal expectation for the use of ScanCode to aid in one or both of the distinct tasks noted above (review for conformance to Fedora licensing policy, decision for choice of License: tag). But even with a high quality tool like ScanCode you can't "trust" its output for purposes of task 1 (whereas its output might be okay enough to be used in a fairly mechanical way for task 2). > 3) Trust the license tag from a project hosting service such as github? > (I understand that the answer may depend on the hosting service.) This is just another license scanning tool. There's no particular reason to "trust" it any more than use of non-hosted tools. My impression in the past was that the GitHub license identification was based on the licensee tool which seemed to be pretty primitive and naive in its assumptions. Maybe that's good enough for task 2, but not for task 1, IMO. Incidentally I also would encourage Fedora to look into the potential for collaboration with the ClearlyDefined project (https://clearlydefined.io/) which is currently not oriented towards Linux distributions or RPM-based packages at all. I could imagine a future where ClearlyDefined could be helpful in both tasks 1 and 2 identified above. Richard _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to legal-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
