NOTE: Please publicize any license changes to your packages

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Sat Jul 21 17:58:09 UTC 2007


On 7/21/07, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-07-21 at 04:37 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> > Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 22:32 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> > >> On 7/20/07, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> > >> > So, the new FESCo is going to act as the "Fedora License Police"
> > >>
> > >> Always so negative.
> > >
> > > Well, why should I change my opinion on something which had been
> > > repeatedly discussed to death (E.g. on FPC meetings) and which I
> > > consider to be "silly and naive"?
> >
> > And that was before GPLv3 was released, mind you...
> A fact which doesn't matter at all
>
>
> 1. Actually, the GPL case is a comparatively simple case, because it's
> widely used.
>
> The situations rendering such "license tagging" absurd are the "not so
> far spread" and "exotic" licenses, which
> * FESCO will never be able to handle due to lack of legal knowledge.
> * RPM's license-tag will not be able to handle without a "license tag"
> registry/Fedora license tag administration office.
>
> 2. Package maintainers are supposed to check their packages for license
> compatibility. Otherwise Fedora will need a "licensing police".
>
> 3. We did cover GPLv3 in our discussions on FPC meetings.

I tend to agree that the problem is going to lie in the more exotic
licenses.  I think it would be *relatively* easy to mandate specifying
GPLv2, GPLv2+, GPLv3, GPLv3+, LGPLv2, LGPLv2+, LGPLv3, LGPLv3+, (And
is there an LGPLv2.1 as well?).  (License proliferation, anyone?)  But
going further in the License tag is going to be descending into
madness.  I'll wait for spot's proposal before jumping the gun on what
I believe to be practical.

I have a question that I would like answered before the Packaging
Meeting that will help clarify some things for me:  Who is the target
audience of this information?  The FPC decided not to establish
guidelines WRT License tags (other than being accurate) before because
the target audience was end-users and we decided that end users should
never take the license tag as authoritative.  If the target audience
is internal developers, then the tag remains a hint.

-Toshio




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