On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 2:04 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 16, 2023 at 2:47 AM Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> It's fine that SPDX doesn't offer this guidance, but Fedora as a
> distributor *needs* it. Fedora provided very valuable guidance with
> its "will-it-blend" chart and offering explicit interpretation. It was
> useful for both packagers and upstreams to figure out what they can
> and cannot do. Eliminating that guidance is creating problems now
> because with the transition to SPDX, you're effectively requiring
> everyone to re-evaluate all packages for their licensing and document
> it without any real ability to figure out if it makes any sense
> anymore.
In my opinion, the default assumption (and I think we should say this
in documentation) should be that if the licenses are all
Fedora-allowed, a particular combination of licenses embodied in a
particular package is okay. If there are specific concerns about some
combination of Fedora-allowed licenses that package maintainers or
others want to raise, they can do so and this will be investigated.
Over the past nearly 15 years, most of them under the previous
documentation/guidance/process regime, my impression has been that
such concerns were raised only in very rare cases, typically involving
a well known upstream issue.
I suspect part of the reason is because Tom Callaway proactively
documented compatibility as part of incorporating licenses. That
eliminated a large portion of the need to ask. Now that the
information is gone, people are asking. :)
The migration to SPDX has been under way now for ~five months and
Benson's issue is the first time I'm aware of that anyone has brought
up a license compatibility issue in a Fedora package during that time
period, FWIW.
I think you've raised an interesting philosophical question, which is
whether FOSS licensing is supposed to "make sense" beyond the mere
juxtaposition of the various licenses that apply to some set of
binaries or source files. I have some preliminary thoughts on this but
will have to think about it some more. :)
I'd argue that it's supposed to make sense, or otherwise people can't
reasonably use it. Part of the value of a distribution is sorting this
mess out for people. :)
--
真実はいつも一つ!/ Always, there's only one truth!