I maintain a package whose sources are mostly MIT (with a couple of files under a BSD license, and one under the Boost license). Upstream just wrote to tell me that the License field on the package is wrong, because it contains binaries that are linked with glpk, which is GPLv3. They argue that the binary package should therefore carry a "GPLv3" license tag, unless I elect to build it without glpk support (which is optional), in which case the current License tag of "MIT and BSD and Boost" would be correct.

Is that true? Do we consider library licenses when filling in the License tag of a package? It would be even worse than that, really, some kind of transitive closure of all licenses on dependencies of all depths, where some licenses "taint" the consuming package's license and some don't.

I do not see an answer to this question on https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines. Thanks for any clarification.

Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/