Fwd: Re: [Fedora-packaging] Licensing guidelines suggestions

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Tue, 2007-08-07 at 19:57 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> 
> > And to answer my own question, I think the answer is no.
> > 
> > Why?
> > 1. OSI doesn't list licenses which don't meet their criteria, the FSF
> > does.
> 
> On the other hand they haven't yet listed all the known Free software 
> licenses like you did but they have previously been open to that. You 
> might want to followup on that.
> 
> > 2. The FSF has been extremely helpful in working with us on licensing
> > matters. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt on licensing
> > conflicts.
> 
> Agreed but then relying on FSF would mean that you are effectively 
> dropping the OSI requirement which is what I suggested earlier. Relying 
> on our own list is more safe if FSF acts up or FSF agrees on a license 
> that Red Hat Legal doesn't want to deal with ever.

That makes more sense.

I think we might want to change the wording to something like:

The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to
build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open
source software. In accordance with that, all packages included in
Fedora must be covered under an approved license. The Fedora approved
license list is generated from the [[link OSI]] and [[link FSF]] lists,
but since those lists conflict with each other, only licenses explicitly
listed here are approved for use in Fedora.