On 8/24/22 8:56 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
Cross-posting this to the devel list.
On Tue, Aug 23, 2022 at 11:41 PM Maxwell G <gotmax@e.email> wrote:
Hi Legal folks,
Can you please consider removing the following rule?
Fedora package maintainers are expected to announce upstream license
changes that they become aware of on the Fedora devel list.
-- https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-review-process/#_what_if_the_license_for_a_fedora_package_changes
This creates unnecessary friction for packagers that simply wish to have
correct License fields. I'm also not sure what purposes it serves.
Richard explicitly said that Fedora does not concern itself with
cross-package license compatibility.
That's typically been the case, yes (and for other Linux distributions too).
And even if it did, a "GPLv3+" to
"GPL-3.0-or-later AND MIT" license change shouldn't cause any new
license compatibility issues.
I am inclined to agree with Maxwell here. I'm guessing this
expectation must have originated pretty early on and mainly out of
concerns about identifying cross-package license incompatibility
situations (I can't really see what other practical purpose the
announcement would serve). While Fedora package maintainers need to be
on alert to any upstream license changes, I think this rule is sort of
out of step with how such upstream license changes may often occur and
is also out of step with how we are now focusing somewhat more closely
on the details of upstream source code licensing.
However, maybe there is some benefit to this announcement rule I am
not seeing. Has an announcement of an upstream license change on the
devel list (assuming the license change is to some other license known
to be allowed in Fedora) ever led to some action on the part of
maintainers of other packages?
I think this is sort of why we simply kept this policy as-is for the
time being - in case there was some benefit we hadn't thought of. I
recall questioning this was to devel instead of legal mailing list but I
think we presumed that was due to the larger audience on devel.
In any case, the one benefit I see at the moment is during this
transition to SPDX, it raises awareness and visibility in case people
need some guidance and may not realize it. Over the long haul, I could
see dropping it though.
Jilayne
Richard
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