On Thu, 2011-09-01 at 21:24 +0100, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote: > > > Legal question: is it better to put this in its own subpackage to be > > > able to specify this individual license, or would GIMP better have > > > "GPLv3+ and LGPLv3+ and (GPLv2 or GPLv3)" as its license? > > > > if you combine them in a single package then I guess you'll have to drop > > the '+' from the license, as the non '+' components prevents it. > > > > IANAL of course. > > > > IANAL either, but as I read this, the logic being suggested is to list all > applicable licenses, not one license for the combined whole (which would > have to be GPLv3 for executables and LGPLv3 for libraries). > > FWIW, a separate package would make the situation clearer. Also NAL, but I believe Dr. Hughes is right - it does depend on how 'separable' the binary elements of the resulting package are. Say some of the code is GPLv2 and some is GPLv2+, and they build into two separately-executable programs which happen to be in the same package, then 'GPLv2 and GPLv2+' would be an appropriate license tag. But if some code was GPLv2 and some was GPLv2+, and both bits of code built into a single binary, the effective license would be GPLv2, because the license tag on the RPM refers to the compiled code, and there's no way you can access the GPLv2+ bit separately from the GPLv2 bit. As I read this specific situation, since you can execute the file-pdf plugin independently of GIMP, if you were to keep them in a single package, then the "GPLv3+ and LGPLv3+ and (GPLv2 or GPLv3)" tag would be appropriate. As everyone else said, a subpackage would probably make things clearer, but I don't think either is legally 'more valid' or 'safer'. It's worth remembering the License: field in the RPM is *informational* in nature, it has no particular legal force or relevance. If you write incorrect information in there it doesn't really result in any legal issues, it's just...an error that should be corrected. But we should probably just wait for Spot to weigh in. =) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
