Hi Benson, Richard,
To add a couple thought to this topic, which I see raised in various
venues every so often:
On 1/4/23 12:11 AM, Benson Muite wrote:
Hi Richard,
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.
This data is helpful. Adding this to SPDX would be good, but given the
number of licenses, it would be most efficient if other interested
parties also contributed to this.
I can tell you that this kind of thing highly unlikely to be added to
the SPDX project for a couple reasons:
1) license "compatibility" relies on a legal interpretation at a couple
levels, which is not the perview of the SPDX Project (nor should be) and
can vary as is the nature of legal interpretations in un-tested areas
2) determining license "compatibility" relies on context (as mentioned
already a couple times in this thread, I think) - that context (i.e.,
how is the software under the various licenses in question being used?)
can vary and it's very hard, if not impossible to capture this fully -
too many variables.
Most attempts to track license compatibility seems to ignore the
question of context or make broad assumptions about how the software is
used or combined. This results in "answers" that may not be correct
given your specific situation.
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.
agreed.
For software licenses, probably a simple categorization is reasonable?
Permissive, weakly protective, strongly protective, network protective
categorization of types of licenses is a bit harder than you'd think.
While it may be somewhat useful in terms of providing generalizations
about compliance, it doesn't really answer the question of license
compatibility.
Suggestions can then be issued to packagers to check license compliance
that typically either the most protective license applies, or contents
with separate licenses are in separate packages.
The Apache 2 and GPL conflict seems well known. There are 1012 packages
in the repositories with both GPL and Apache licenses:
$ dnf repoquery --all --info > allpackageinfo.txt
$ cat allpackageinfo.txt | grep -n "ASL.* GPL" >> GPLonly_AND_APACHE.txt
$ cat allpackageinfo.txt | grep -n "Apache.* GPL" >> GPLonly_AND_APACHE.txt
$ cat allpackageinfo.txt | grep -n " GPL.*ASL" >> GPLonly_AND_APACHE.txt
$ cat allpackageinfo.txt | grep -n " GPL.*Apache" >> GPLonly_AND_APACHE.txt
$ wc -l GPLonly_AND_APACHE.txt
Need to check that either GPL license is the main one that applies with
Apache licensed software included in GPL software but no GPL software in
Apache licensed software or separate Apache and GPL packages are produced:
https://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html
to play devil's advocate a bit here:
This conflict is well known because the ASF or the FSF says this, but
does that make it legally true? Who might challenge this in court and
what would that case look like in terms of who would bring such a case
and under what claims?
Some incompatibilities are more obvious given the specific conditions of
the licenses that directly conflict in that you cannot comply with both
at the same time (e.g., combining GPL or any license that requires the
release of source code with code under a license that restricts access
to source code) - but those are less likely to be of the kind at issue
here given Fedora's broader licensing policy.
Other incompatibilities are more based on community ideals or statements
from license stewards, which while influential, may not have been tested
in court. In that case, how does one decide?
(btw, I don't have good answers to these questions :)
Maybe there are other well known cases that should be documented and
perhaps put in the review tool?
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.
Generalized conclusions/suggestions would be helpful.
Lastly, I would suggest taking past promulgations on the general topic
here by commentators with a fairly enormous grain of salt.
+1
Jilayne
Richard
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