Hi all, > On Fri, Jun 10, 2022 at 9:35 AM Richard Fontana rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > Jilayne, I think we can be confident that SPDX-legal will be efficient > enough as long as you are involved in leading it and also are involved > on the Fedora side, but it would be reasonable for Fedora community > members to wonder what will happen if one or both of those > involvements were to ever change. Maybe we should think about a backup > plan (like, if some version of the SPDX namespace proposal is adopted, > making use of that if SPDX-legal is not responsive by a certain time, > or using LicenseRef- to create SPDX-conformant identifiers that can be > altered later on to SPDX-adopted identifiers as needed). > The Fedora Community has a good reputation for collaboration across communities. Given the close connection to the SPDX Legal team via Jilayne's role as a maintainer, I think it is worth giving it a go with a clear flag to the community as trialing a new process. A contingency plan for when things don't go ideally is a way to build efficacy into the process. It is a reason why a contingency plan is included in the Fedora Change Proposal template. There should also be a scheduled window to retrospect on the process and identify what is working well and what is not. If this is submitted as a Fedora 37 Change, then perhaps targeting a retrospective in Fedora 39 or 40. > On Friday, June 10th, 2022 at 09:44, Vít Ondruch <vondruch@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Maybe I wonder (similarly to you) what would be purpose of this ML, if > all discussion happens in some issue tracker. > Maybe for people like me who are plugged into too many issue trackers as it is. :-) Although a tag for #legal on discussion.fp.o could be nice… ;-) > On Friday, June 10th, 2022 at 10:33, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Tom's system had one very important property that SPDX lacks: human > coherence. SPDX is inherently verbose and forces specificity where > none is necessary in practice, which means that even minute variations > in licenses (and we all know that BSD and MIT variants are a dime a > dozen) now need new identifiers. > I understand this. It adds low-value labor to the packaging workflow for every package to require a perfectly accurate identifier. There is also significant labor in transitioning not only existing identifiers, but also habits of existing packagers to support this change. But instead of identifiers, shouldn't this be solved at the level of process and software? I see a strong case for maintaining simplicity for packagers, but I also do not see a strong case against supporting SPDX identifiers in some capacity. These were two ideas I had, but I don't have a deep RPM development background to back them: 1. A subset of identifiers as "super identifiers" that support license families under commonly-understood terms. Packagers are encouraged to use more verbose identifiers, but super identifiers are also permitted. Super identifiers are understood to be intentionally unspecific as license families. 2. Creating a Fedora-specific license identifier that indicates a new license is acknowledged by Fedora Legal, but it does not have an assigned SPDX identifier or it is under review. For the purpose of identifiers, this could be a prefix like "FE-" combined with a super identifier (above) that represents a known license family. I think this supports packagers in getting quick answers for identifiers to use in packages, while enabling a Fedora Legal/SPDX Legal discussion to pan out. If/when a SPDX identifier is created for a new license, the Fedora-specific license identifier can be aliased to the new SPDX identifier. I'm not sure how viable these ideas are in the RPM end of things, but I am pulling from my experience as a packager and also O.S. legal enthusiast in other places. I believe this approach better balances the scale of manual packager labor to using a common set of identifiers to aid in legal support for Fedora.
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