[Fedora-legal-list] Redistributing license text with binary RPMs
Hello,
Many Fedora-approved software licences require binary distributions to include the license
text along with the software. For example the family of BSD licenses says that
"redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list
of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution" and ASL 2.0 says that "You must give any other
recipients of the Work or Derivative Works a copy of this License". My understanding
is that in case of Fedora redistributing a copy of the license along with RPM package is a
prerequisite for redistributing it al all.
In some cases the upstream itself doesn't redistribute the copy of the license. From
technical point of view it's fine because they are copyright holders and therefore
they can do whatever they want with the software they have rights to. In some other cases
the upstream is providing source code only and source distribution doesn't require
including the text of the license.
Fedora Licensing Guidelines says: "if (and only if) the source package includes the
text of the license(s) in its own file, then that file, containing the text of the
license(s) for the package must be included in %doc". This can cause problems in some
cases.
My questions are:
1. According to Fedora Licensing Guidelines, is it prohibited to include the text of the
license within the binary RPM package if the source package does not include the text of
the license?
2. Isn't redistributing binary RPMs without the license text included (in case the
license requires that) considered as violation of the license?
3. What is the proper way of handling the case when upstream is rejecting requests to
include the license text in their distribution, while they are requiring Fedora to include
it?
(An example of an affected package is annox, which is currently in its review process:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=808768)
Thank you,
Mikolaj Izdebski
Red Hat