passwd license clarification

[Miloslav Trmač]

On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 06:09:52PM +0100, Miloslav Trmač wrote:
>> the "passwd" package has contained
>>   License: BSD or GPLv2+
>> however, there is no "version 2 or later" clause in any of the
>> copyright notices.  So I've just updated it to
>>   License: BSD or GPL+
>> and will build this in F18 and rawhide.
>
> From the COPYING file, it looks like the actual intention is to license
> under a BSD license with an exception for converting to GPL. But, Since the
> three-clause BSD license is used, it's my understanding that that's not
> really necessary. Since Red Hat holds the copyright and there do not appear
> to be any non-Red Hat authors, maybe the best thing to do would be simply to
> ask if we can relicense this as BSD 2-clause and be done with it?

I want the spec file to not be misleading, but I don't think involving
lawyers, only to simplify a license of 1789 lines of code, code that
is very liberally licensed in any case, is really worth the effort.
    Mirek