[Fedora-legal-list] WOL - wide open license - compatibility with Fedora

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 12:19 +1000, David Timms wrote:

> Is this compatible with Fedora ?
> What would be the License field if the whole package was licensed this way ?

Yes, it's MIT (a minimal variant). Free and GPL compatible.

License: MIT

> In this case, the source archive has:
> - [GPLv3] COPYING (overall copying file).
> - [GPLv2] header (no or later version) in most source/header files.
> - [GPL+] 3x files {GPL, no version mentioned, see COPYING}.
> - WOL 1x file/header
> What would be the required license, or will a need to query upstream for 
> their licensing intentions {each module tends to have differing authors} ?

Are they compiled together? 

If the files with different licenses compile into separate, standalone
binaries, then you need to list each license like this:

License: FOO and BAR and BAZ

If they compile with each other to form one combined work, we'd look at
the license on the files and determine what the whole is. In the case
that you've documented, it looks like the whole is GPLv2 (the most
restrictive GPL license), and the MIT part is absorbed (GPL does that).
We ignore COPYING.

License: GPLv2

Of course, it is odd that they would include a COPYING that has GPLv3 in
it, but not have any source files with GPLv3 attribution.

If you have a SRPM, I can look at it and be sure.

~spot