On Tue, Jan 04, 2022 at 09:05:59PM -0800, Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:

On 1/4/22 9:27 AM, David Cantrell wrote:

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 11:46:44AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 11:22 AM Miroslav Suchý <msuchy@redhat.com> wrote:

I want to clarify one thing I am working on. When I have this string in License tag in spec:

    Good License or Bad license

Then the result is Good license and the package is allowed to be in Fedora, right?

So first of all if I change your question to be about the actual
underlying license terms of the package as opposed to the
representation in the spec file, I believe the answer must be "yes"
and there are probably a lot of examples of this in Fedora. (Think of
any arbitrary package that says it's under some FOSS license and also
says informally that proprietary licenses are also available.)

With the spec file, though, I believe there is an inconsistency in how
Fedora deals with this, but this is just a casual impression. On the
one hand, there is the common case of traditionally-licensed Perl
modules (typically, a dual license involving unversioned GPL and a
license identified as the Artistic License 1.0 [which I realize exists
in multiple forms, but let's ignore that]). Fedora spec files for such
Perl module packages generally say something like "GPL or Artistic",
even though Fedora classifies the Artistic License as a "bad" license.
I *think* there may be other examples, not involving Perl modules or
the Artistic License, where the code is dual licensed under a good
license and a bad license and the spec file only gives the good
license. The only rationale I could come up with for the difference in
approach is that the Artistic License, while "bad" from Fedora's
perspective, is generally seen as plausibly-FOSS (it's an OSI-approved
license, for one thing).

I think it comes down to whether Fedora wants to have spec files that
say, for example, "GPL or Proprietary" much as it has spec files that
say "GPL or Artistic".

It's true there is inconsistency regarding the License tag in the spec
file.  As the package maintainer and as part of the Fedora project, I
would prefer that the License tag in the spec reflect the license
terms that we are distributing the built package against.  So in the
case of Perl modules that are generally GPL or Artistic, the Fedora
project is really redistributing them under the terms of the GPL only,
right?

I think the answer to the inconsistency here is to set a policy relating to disjunctive licensed packages and then document that in the packaging guidelines. This would provide clarity for both package maintainers as well as downstream recipients. My recommendation would be that in the case where (random example):

The package license upstream is: AGPL-3.0-or-later OR SSPL-1.0

and where Fedora would not allow SSPL-1.0, then the License field in the spec file would simply indicate:

AGPL-3.0-or-later

If one really wants to be thorough and there is some kind of comment field in the Spec file (I think I've seen this?), then one could note something along the lines of "This package is licensed upstream as AGPL-3.0-or-later OR SSPL-1.0"

Yes, this is what I was thinking.  And as Richard noted in a later followup,
this has been the standard we've followed for a while--but I don't think we've
actually written it down formally.  We should do that.