no restriction license?

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Thu Aug 16 15:05:04 UTC 2007


On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 16:57 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

> Erm, I thought the "License: foo and bar" was only necessary if there are 
> different licensed binaries in the same rpm (not srpm, think subpackages), and 
> that if one binary has code from multiple compatible licenses that then only 
> the strictest license should be named for that binary, as that is the effective 
> license for that binary then. So if I have a package with 3 binaries, one all 
> GPLv2+ code, one GPLv2+ and some BSD code, and one GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+ code, 
> then all 3 binaries are effectively licensed under GPLv2+ and thus the License 
> tag is just: "GPLv2+" and not "GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+ and BSD".

Yes. The one exception to this is when the licenses are compatible, but
not consuming. (Note: This is really rare. GPL/LGPL + anything ==
GPL/LGPL)

In some cases, it is possible for a binary to be generated from multiple
source files with compatible, but differing licenses. Thus, the binary
file would actually have simultaneous dual licensing (an AND, as opposed
to an OR). For example, it is possible that a binary is generated from a
source file licensed as BSD with advertising, and another source file
licensed as QPL (which specifies that modifications must be shipped as
patches). In this scenario, we'd wrap the list of licenses for that
binary with parenthesis, example: 

Package spot-utils contains some files under the Python License, but one
of the files is generated from a BSD with advertising source file and a
QPL source file. 

License: Python and (BSD with advertising and QPL)

Think about it like this:

If License A has a restriction on what you may eat, and License B has a
restriction on what you may drink, but they are otherwise compatible,
the resulting work would have both restrictions, and we need to reflect
that in the License tag.

~spot




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