On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 23:05 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote: > 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 I think we're going to need the Fedora Board to decide this. Its a little outside of our jurisdiction, unfortunately. > 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. My interpretation is that the License: tag represents the license/copyright on the bits in the binary rpm. Again, keep in mind that the License: tag is not legally binding, so its more of a helpful tool for initial auditing, and not much more. > 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. This seems fine to me. I'll work on drafting a change for vote. ~spot -- Fedora-packaging mailing list Fedora-packaging@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-packaging
