python-pillow license - MIT? something else?

[Luis Villa]

Hey, all-

I was looking upstream at a new-to-me license (PIL license used in Pillow
<https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/LICENSE>). It is
MIT-ish, but ... to my mind, definitely not MIT. Line them up side-by-side
and you'll see reasonably large differences.  (GitHub's `licensee` reports
the two licenses as a ~56% match, which is an imperfect measure but
indicative)

I was considering filing it as a new-ish license at SPDX, so I checked "is
this packaged in Fedora", and I see that the Fedora python-pillow spec
<https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-pillow/blob/master/f/python-pil...
simply labels this MIT.

So my question: what should this be labeled as in Fedora? If the answer is
MIT, is there any guidance (formal or informal) on when MIT considers an
MIT-ish license close enough?

Thanks-
Luis

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 6:42 PM Luis Villa <luis(a)lu.is&gt; wrote:

>  Hey, all-
>
>  I was looking upstream at a new-to-me license (PIL license used in Pillow
>  <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/LICENSE>). It is
>  MIT-ish, but ... to my mind, definitely not MIT. Line them up side-by-side
>  and you'll see reasonably large differences.  (GitHub's `licensee` reports
>  the two licenses as a ~56% match, which is an imperfect measure but
>  indicative)
>
>  I was considering filing it as a new-ish license at SPDX, so I checked "is
>  this packaged in Fedora", and I see that the Fedora python-pillow spec
>
> <https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-pillow/blob/master/f/python-pil...
>  simply labels this MIT.
>
>  So my question: what should this be labeled as in Fedora? If the answer is
>  MIT, is there any guidance (formal or informal) on when MIT considers an
>  MIT-ish license close enough?
>  
Fedora has a convention of using the "MIT" label for a variety of mostly
nonstandard simple permissive licenses that seem to have an X/MIT sort of
pedigree rather than a BSD/Berkeley sort of pedigree. The pillow license
seems similar to what OSI calls the Historical Permission Notice and
Disclaimer (which I think Fedora does not treat as "MIT" but that may be
because of consequences of the OSI classification).

Richard

[Luis Villa]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2019 at 8:34 AM Richard Fontana <rfontana(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:

>  On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 6:42 PM Luis Villa <luis(a)lu.is&gt; wrote:
>
> > Hey, all-
> >
> > I was looking upstream at a new-to-me license (PIL license used in Pillow
> > <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/LICENSE>). It is
> > MIT-ish, but ... to my mind, definitely not MIT. Line them up side-by-side
> > and you'll see reasonably large differences.  (GitHub's `licensee` reports
> > the two licenses as a ~56% match, which is an imperfect measure but
> > indicative)
> >
> > I was considering filing it as a new-ish license at SPDX, so I checked
> > "is this packaged in Fedora", and I see that the Fedora python-pillow
> > spec
> >
> <https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-pillow/blob/master/f/python-pil...
> > simply labels this MIT.
> >
> > So my question: what should this be labeled as in Fedora? If the answer
> > is MIT, is there any guidance (formal or informal) on when MIT considers an
> > MIT-ish license close enough?
> >
>
>  Fedora has a convention of using the "MIT" label for a variety of mostly
>  nonstandard simple permissive licenses that seem to have an X/MIT sort of
>  pedigree rather than a BSD/Berkeley sort of pedigree.
>  
Today I learned! Thanks, I assumed there was some sort of convention along
those lines.


>  The pillow license seems similar to what OSI calls the Historical
>  Permission Notice and Disclaimer (which I think Fedora does not treat as
>  "MIT" but that may be because of consequences of the OSI classification).
>  
Indeed, it is basically HPND. Good eye.

Luis