On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 1:59 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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. One thing I've been slowly working on getting packaged up and usable in Fedora is openSUSE's Cavil tool[1], which does not make a judgement on licenses, per se, but does a deep scan similar to our licensecheck tool but presents the output in a much more meaningfully understandable form. There's also some pattern matching and confidence interval stuff which can help in determining what the effective license is for the project, which is something that human reviewers tend to struggle with. The problem with most license scanning tools is that they try to "judge" the result based on a very limited set of heuristics, mostly based on license file detection. As we know, this is insufficient for figuring out the true nature of a project's licensing, and this is one thing Cavil is better at handling. Perhaps this could help with making package reviews easier to go through for legal review stuff. [1]: https://github.com/openSUSE/cavil -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ 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
