On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 04:08:03PM +0200, Michal Schorm wrote: > On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 3:45 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The BUSL-derived Sentry licenses (currently the subject of an SPDX > > issue) have AFAIK not been considered by Fedora, and I hope that these > > licenses have no impact on any existing Fedora package. > ... > > I think we can cross the bridge when we come to it -- or have we come to it? > ... > > I think this is alluding to the "no effective license" principle. But > > in lots of situations we have to make guesses and interpretations of > > various sorts. I can maybe see adopting the position that these > > licenses are so odious that we don't want to distribute anything that > > was even formerly under them (until the theoretical trigger to free is > > reached) but that seems a little extreme to me if it's just a kind of > > political gesture. There's already a license allowed in Fedora -- it's > > pretty obscure and I can't remember the name offhand -- where the > > license basically says something like "proprietary until the year > > 2000, then you have the following FOSS license" and this is allowed > > because in that case the change date is clearly something that > > occurred *long* ago. > > I was recently contacted by MariaDB upstream, saying they would like > to see MaxScale (a DB proxy) [1], their product, to become adopted by > distributions, since the oldest major version (21.06) just recently > reached the license transformation date (2024-06-03) and should be > under 'GPL-2.0-or-later' now. [2] > > So in this case - no, the package is not part of Fedora yet, we only > just started talks about whether it could be. > But yes, I believe we just came to that bridge. > > I also share the opinion that there's no need to be strict just for > the reason for a political gesture. Likely the exact opposite - I > believe we should be happy the upstreams are accepting the idea of > FOSS and are making an effort to find some compromise with what they > are used to - and try to be welcoming to this type of licenses. If it is MariaDB who are pushing this, then I'd note they could take steps to make this into a total non-issue. ie they could update the git branch for the old version that is past the "Change Date" cutoff, such that its LICENSE file & file headers are updated to all refer to "GPL" instead of "BUSL", and then release an updated bugfix tarball. With that the FOSS nature would be fully unambiguous and thus trivally accepted by any distro maintainers. With regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| -- _______________________________________________ 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
