NOTE: Please publicize any license changes to your packages

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 7/22/07, Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> wrote:
> If you think so, I disagree. You are driving away contributors from
> fedora, by imposing more and more bureaucracy. If  you really want this
> YOU (Jef Spaleta in person) will have to do it yourselves.

I am watching for upstream licensing changes in about as many places
as I can think to look. But I am only two people...  two very stupid
people, with a reading comprehension problem.

And please, I sincerely would like to hear off-list from any
contributors( other than Ralf) who are being driven away from fedora
because of the request to keep the rest of the contributor pool
informed of re-licensing issues.

I realize that every policy decision has an implementation cost. But
given the importance of licensing to the overall availability of the
software repository, I don't think the request to keep the maintainer
pool informed is over-burdensome.  I very much would like to avoid
getting into a situation where a serious re-licensing issues
necessitates a major disruption in workflow for everyone who currently
uses cvs commit access.  I'm not much of a gambler, so given the
choice I'd rather encourage a proactive approach to the initial season
of gpl3 re-licensing, then to wait to be reactive to a licensing
problem after it appears inside our software repository.

I'd absolutely love it if we could all collectively bury our heads in
the sand as upstream codebases choose to re-license under gpl3. I'd
love it if we could all be free to be irresponsible. But we can't, the
continued availability of the software repository and build system
depends on making sure we don't inadvertently introduce licensing
violations. The only way we are going to avoid problems, especially
with violations concerning library linking, is if we, as a community
of peers, communicate re-licensing issues before they enter our
repository.

-jef"death eater's local #205"spaleta