Hello, Here's a few notes/questions that IMO need to be addressed in the new licensing guidelines in Wiki. IANAL, etc, but anyway, something for near future FPC meetings (which I still probably won't be able to attend to for a couple of weeks): 1) The licensing pages strongly imply that OSI-approved licenses are ok. However for example the original Artistic license is OSI-approved but listed in Wiki page as "bad". Something needs real fixing - "ask upstream to move to a "good" Artistic license" is IMO just a band aid. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php 2) The Wiki pages refer to "files" and "content" without specifying whether those refer to files/content in the source rpm, the resulting binary rpms, or both. Example case: an upstream source tarball contains source files under let's say BSD, LGPLv2.1+ and GPLv2+ licenses. That would mean that let's say a binary built from all those would fall under GPLv2+. Specifying GPLv2+ as the License tag would be misrepresenting the copyrights of the files in the source rpm that carry BSD and LGPLv2.1+ notices. Specifying "BSD and LGPLv2.1+ and GPLv2+" would be misrepresenting the copyright of the combined work in the resulting binary. 3) Source licenses are not the only thing that affect the distributables' copyrights. For example when something is built from let's say LGPLv2+ sources but linked with a GPLv2+ library, the resulting binary will be GPLv2+, while the sources are still LGPLv2+ (unless their embedded copyright notices are changed to GPLv2+, but that can't be done for many *GPL licenses). Suggested combined fix for 2) and 3) above: change the licensing guidelines to prominently note something like that the value of the License tag represents the copyright/license info of binary packages only, and only when built in the configuration specified by the Fedora build system, build dependencies/conflicts in the specfile, and no non-Fedora software installed that will affect the build in any way. Source rpms' copyrights are determined by the sources and other content included in them. -- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging
