Re: Important changes to software license information in Fedora packages (SPDX and more!)

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On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 6:45 PM Stephen Smoogen <ssmoogen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Since a lot of code is going to have a LOT of different licences which for some seem to grow every minor upstream release it would be better for the RPM License tag to have something like:
>
> License: It's complicated. (Please see /usr/share/<package-name>/licences for a complete list.)
>
> otherwise I am worried we will run into some sort of string length limit in RPM or other tooling.

I'm not sure whether there's a limit to the length of RPM Tags.
But I started doing something similar for Rust packages for another
reason: To ensure informational value of the License string for end
users.

Especially for Rust binaries that have a large dependency tree, just
collecting the License strings of all components and concatenating
them would result in a string that is comically long (even with
deduplication of non-unique values), and would be completely useless
for actually providing information to users of a package.
I know that the new licensing guidelines discourage "simplification"
when combining Licenses from multiple components, but I also think
that providing a string that's hundreds of characters long defeats the
purpose, and does not actually provide anything of value to users.

Instead, I put the "simplified" license string into the License tag
(which is seen by users), and put the full license breakdown of all
components into a separate file (which can be several hundred lines
long / several KB big, which is why I don't just paste its contents
into the .spec file as a comment). I'm pretty sure that satisfies both
requirements (providing information to the user *and* keeping accurate
license information) - something like:

License: ASL 2.0 and BSD and MIT
# LICENSE.dependencies contains a full license breakdown

Fabio
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