Re: Changing the License tag of python-rpm-generators from GPLv2+ to a monstrosity

[Richard Fontana]

On Fri, May 5, 2023 at 9:56 AM Chris Kelley <ckelley(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
>  As a purely logical expression, this simplifies to "GPL-2.0-or-later AND
> LGPL-2.1-or-later". Is that sort of simplification not allowed? 
The short answer is, these are not truly logical expressions and
therefore they shouldn't necessarily simplify. Of course you could
adopt some arbitrary convention for such simplification, which might
or might not be well-grounded in some interpretation of the licenses
at issue. In the past, there was no documented uniform set of
conventions and basically each package maintainer applied their own
assumptions about how license expressions could be simplified, leading
to general inconsistency across different packages. The general trend
in Fedora that I observed over many years was that license tags were
getting more specific, i.e. less "simplification" was being done (or
ignoring certain licenses was occurring less). This is actually shown
by the fact that the Callaway system had a "Public Domain" which was
widely used in packages with license tags containing references to
other licenses. So we aren't actually changing policy here.

Still, the cases involving public domain dedications are fairly
extreme in this regard. If we *were* to adopt some system of
simplification of license expressions that's probably where we'd
start.

Richard

>  On Fri, 5 May 2023, 13:20 Miro Hrončok, <mhroncok(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:
> >
> > python-rpm-generators License tag changes from GPLv2+ to:
> >
> > GPL-2.0-or-later AND LGPL-2.1-or-later AND (LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain OR
> > LGPL-2.1-or-later OR GPL-2.0-or-later)
> >
> > https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-rpm-generators/pull-request/67
> >
> > Funny thing is that the "(LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain OR LGPL-2.1-or-later
> > OR GPL-2.0-or-later)" thing was originally chosen to keep the License tag of
> > the package simple while allowing others to grab the code from it without
> > obligations :/
> >
> > --
> > Miro Hrončok
>