Re: license of our products on getfedora.org
On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 09:47:26AM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 12:49:01PM +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
wrote:
> I was trying to answer the question "How is the license of Fedora as a
> whole advertised?" (e.g. in the sense of what can I do with an ISO image
> I download from https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/).
> Do we specify how the whole collection is licensed anywhere?
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Licenses/LicenseAgreement?rd=Legal/L...
"Fedora is a compilation of software packages, each under its own license.
The compilation itself is released under the MIT license. However, this
compilation license does not supersede the licenses of code and content
contained in Fedora, which conform to the legal guidelines described at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing."
Thanks, this is useful. Shouldn't this be prominently linked from
https://getfedora.org/ though?
The only link on gf.o is to
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Main#Legal which does include the link to
Legal:Licenses,
which includes a link to Legal:Licenses/LicenseAgreement.
My worry is that even though *you* and *I* know the license of Fedora
is, a "random" person should not be expected to go through 3 links and
a legal text to find the license.
For comparison:
* https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ has three panes, and the third
one is "terms & conditons" and includes an obvious link to a license.
* https://software.opensuse.org/distributions/tumbleweed has a (not very
visible but easily seen when one scrolls down a bit) link to
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:License which contains fairly clear
legalese.
* https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop is possibly even harder to
navigate than us
(https://www.ubuntu.com/legal links to https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies
which says "Our intellectual property rights policy lets you use,
modify and redistribute Ubuntu. It also outlines how you can use our
trademarks, design assets and other copyrighted materials." which is
slightly nauseating in itself, which then links to
https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy
which is full of crap. Our website may be hard to navigate, but at
least we don't pretend we wrote and own all free software.)
* https://www.debian.org/distrib/ has a link to https://www.debian.org/intro/free
which is a wall of text, which afaict doesn't even answer the question in
$subject.
This is all slightly disappointing. Proprietary software is much
better about putting up clear information about licensing.
Zbyszek