On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 2:04 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 2:47 AM Neal Gompa <ngompa13@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > It's fine that SPDX doesn't offer this guidance, but Fedora as a > > distributor *needs* it. Fedora provided very valuable guidance with > > its "will-it-blend" chart and offering explicit interpretation. It was > > useful for both packagers and upstreams to figure out what they can > > and cannot do. Eliminating that guidance is creating problems now > > because with the transition to SPDX, you're effectively requiring > > everyone to re-evaluate all packages for their licensing and document > > it without any real ability to figure out if it makes any sense > > anymore. > > In my opinion, the default assumption (and I think we should say this > in documentation) should be that if the licenses are all > Fedora-allowed, a particular combination of licenses embodied in a > particular package is okay. If there are specific concerns about some > combination of Fedora-allowed licenses that package maintainers or > others want to raise, they can do so and this will be investigated. > Over the past nearly 15 years, most of them under the previous > documentation/guidance/process regime, my impression has been that > such concerns were raised only in very rare cases, typically involving > a well known upstream issue. > I suspect part of the reason is because Tom Callaway proactively documented compatibility as part of incorporating licenses. That eliminated a large portion of the need to ask. Now that the information is gone, people are asking. :) > The migration to SPDX has been under way now for ~five months and > Benson's issue is the first time I'm aware of that anyone has brought > up a license compatibility issue in a Fedora package during that time > period, FWIW. > > I think you've raised an interesting philosophical question, which is > whether FOSS licensing is supposed to "make sense" beyond the mere > juxtaposition of the various licenses that apply to some set of > binaries or source files. I have some preliminary thoughts on this but > will have to think about it some more. :) > I'd argue that it's supposed to make sense, or otherwise people can't reasonably use it. Part of the value of a distribution is sorting this mess out for people. :) -- 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 Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
