On Tue, Jan 3, 2023 at 11:02 AM Richard Fontana <rfontana(a)redhat.com> wrote:
We did this because in essentially no real-world case
was the information ever used to take any action with respect to an
actual or proposed Fedora package.
[snip]
Any Fedora community member who has a concern about a license
compatibility issue involving a specific Fedora package or proposed
Fedora package is encouraged to raise it (probably most appropriately
in a Bugzilla bug) and it will be looked at in a context-specific way.
This context-specific analysis will consider not only architectural
issues (of the sort referred to by Miroslav) but also the licensing,
development and political history of the code at issue and general
relevant FOSS community practices. If it will prove useful we will try
to document some generalized conclusions in the Fedora license
documentation.
Speaking of "political history", there is a lot of talk about the
unintentional incompatibility of (Apache-2.0 AND GPL-2.0) but nothing
about the allegedly intentional incompatibility of (CDDL-1.0 AND
GPL-*).
Would you really want to reconsider previously thoroughly litigated
matters such as cdrtools or OpenZFS each individually? These are 2
real-world cases that were probably considered on their own merits but
nevertheless ultimately banned by the documented incompatibility in
the license wiki. While I don't think anyone is seriously proposing
going back to the first one in the year 2022 AD, I can't help but
wonder if the author of the former might have been one motivation for
capturing this information in the first place LOL. And OpenZFS might
reasonably be proposed for inclusion in Fedora now that it is relaxing
its restrictions around third party modules such as Nvidia's driver
and at least one prominent distribution ships it.
I don't think we need a big old "will it blend?" list, it's not
necessary to consider and document the GPL compatibility of each and
every license on the Fedora allowed list. But I do think there is
merit in a Not Allowed SPDX "AND" Expressions List that is scoped
similarly to the Not Allowed Fedora Licenses List, that is only to
combinations which exist in actual software that has been proposed for
or previously included in Fedora. If you feel that (Apache-2.0 AND
GPL-2.0) doesn't belong on it due to the different history of that
incompatibility that's fantastic, but I would love to hear your
counterexample for how anything with (CDDL-1.0 AND GPL-2.0) could ever
possibly be allowed. :-D