[Fedora-legal-list] Re: good/bad v. approved/not-approved

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 05:18:48PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
>  On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 5:08 PM Jilayne Lovejoy
> <jlovejoy(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  > On 3/3/22 2:51 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
>  > > On Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 12:03:15PM -0700, Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:
>  > >>
>  > >> Given that "good" and "bad" are historical for the
> Fedora licensing
>  > >> documentation - what are your thoughts on this?
>  > > I like the idea of moving to 'approved' vs 'not approved' in
> general. I
>  > > think most people looking at that list will be looking in the context of
>  > > packaging for Fedora and will just want to know if it's approved or not.
>  > >
>  > > That said, I think Neil makes a good point about people choosing
>  > > licenses. Would it make sense to have 'approved' and 'not
> approved' and
>  > > 'reccomended' ? :) Of course then recommended would be subjective, but
>  > > perhaps thats ok. This would just be a smaller subset of licenses that
>  > > are not only approved, but encouraged by the project.
>  > >
>  > That's an interesting idea  - are you thinking this would be in the
>  > context of:  "If you are creating or considering a license for a package
>  > that you want included in Fedora, here is a list of recommended licenses
>  > to use" ?  (which I suppose implicitly says, use an approved/good one,
>  > but don't just pick any old approved/good one, please) 
Yeah... More like "If you are starting an open source project and plan
to package it for Fedora, here's a list of what we consider the "best"
licenses to use.

>  Historically I think Fedora had some informal standards around
>  Fedora-specific projects (not Fedora packages, but projects that are
>  in some sense part of the larger Fedora project) but I am not sure
>  this has ever really been documented. Most Fedora projects seem to use 
There have been some standards around applications/packages written for
Fedora Infrastructure: 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Licensing
but of course thats changed somewhat in recent years with the Fedora
Council saying it was ok to use non free infrastructure if needed.

>  GPLv2, the MIT license, LGPLv2.1, perhaps GPLv3 to some degree. I
>  don't see a compelling need for Fedora to start making recommendations
>  for *Fedora* projects since this has seemed to work pretty well as an
>  informal thing. As for whether Fedora should make broader
>  recommendations ... I am not sure at this point Fedora doing so will
>  have much impact on upstream licensing choices so I don't know if it
>  would really be worthwhile. 
Yeah, probibly not much effect. 

>  Internally at Red Hat, we have had a fairly lengthy list of
>  default-approved licenses for new projects for some time now. We've
>  thought about making this a much smaller list. I wouldn't immediately
>  see a need for this list to be harmonized with a hypothetical Fedora
>  recommended list since it serves rather different purposes, in
>  contrast to our goal of harmonizing Fedora "good" and "bad" license
>  lists more generally with internal Red Hat counterparts. 
Just a thought. Perhaps it's not practical / useful now (although it
might have been once upon a time).

kevin