On Mon, Jan 2, 2023 at 12:45 AM Benson Muite <benson_muite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Fedora-review has a license check component that lists license types > available in a package. However, not all licenses are compliant with > each other. A chart indicating which licenses can be included with other > licenses is available at: > https://dwheeler.com/essays/floss-license-slide.html > Would it be possible to create a similar chart for all SPDX identifiers > that can be used in Fedora? This would enable adding such a check to > fedora-review. Hi Benson, Fedora used to maintain in its old license list an indication of whether a "good" license was GPLv2 and (separately) GPLv3 compatible. We thought this over carefully but decided not to continue this practice in the migration of this data to the fedora-license-data repository. This despite the fact that a lot of careful thought went into those determinations (such that I think the preserved record of those determinations has some significant historical value for GPL interpretation). We did this because in essentially no real-world case was the information ever used to take any action with respect to an actual or proposed Fedora package. As for compatibility of arbitrary licenses more generally: If I'm counting correctly, Fedora now has 286 licenses in the simple "allowed" category (corresponding to the old "good [for software]" category) and this is expected to increase substantially with the ongoing migration to use of SPDX identifiers. So it is basically impractical if not impossible to maintain any useful, well-reasoned set of context-free compatibility relationships for each Fedora allowed license with respect to any other arbitrary Fedora allowed license. Any Fedora community member who has a concern about a license compatibility issue involving a specific Fedora package or proposed Fedora package is encouraged to raise it (probably most appropriately in a Bugzilla bug) and it will be looked at in a context-specific way. This context-specific analysis will consider not only architectural issues (of the sort referred to by Miroslav) but also the licensing, development and political history of the code at issue and general relevant FOSS community practices. If it will prove useful we will try to document some generalized conclusions in the Fedora license documentation. Lastly, I would suggest taking past promulgations on the general topic here by commentators with a fairly enormous grain of salt. 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 Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
