On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 12:44 PM Richard Fontana <rfontana(a)redhat.com> wrote:
I see the problem with "approved"/"not-approved"
as being that it
sounds relatively unpleasantly "corporate" compared to
"good"/"not
good" which have an attractive, vaguely humorous, vaguely
countercultural quality in keeping with some aspects of Fedora's
roots. But the problem with "good"/"not good" is precisely around
value judgments. Most of these "good" licenses are not really that
good at all -- they are tolerable but in some cases barely acceptable.
They meet minimum standards -- sometimes questionably so. I'm not
suggesting those standards need to be made stricter; they're actually
already pretty strict. But I wouldn't want to give the message that we
actually think most (if not all) of these licenses are "good" in the
normal English language sense of "good".
So on balance I'd support "approved" or "acceptable" over
"good".
When I evaluate a project for packaging in Fedora, what I want to know
is: "Is this project released under a license that permits packaging
it for Fedora?" The approved/not-approved language speaks to that.
That's the only value judgment I need to make, so with my packager hat
on, I am okay with moving away from good/bad.
Neal's point about developers is an interesting one. Thinking about
this with my developer hat on, my task is to select a license that
gives me the protections I want, and gives others the right to do with
it what I want them to do with it. Let's say that I have selected a
candidate license, and that I want Linux distributions to redistribute
my software. My question now is, "Do the Linux distributions I care
about accept this license?" Approved/not-approved clearly answers
that question. Good/bad sort of answers that question, but less
clearly in my mind.
Sorry Neal, but I don't see how approved/not-approved loses anything
over good/bad. Can you clarify what you think would be lost?
--
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/