[Fedora-legal-list] Claims about Fair License

[Vassilis Palassopoulos]

Florian Weimer wrote:

> Maybe it's covered by this item?
> 
>   <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#informal>

I don't think the claims are covered by this because although it suggests that informal licenses are generally free software and GPL compatible, it does mention that there could be problems due to the wording or the legal system of the country. So it is possible for an informal license (in our case Fair License) to seem free software (to the untrained eye) but actually be non-free due to poor wording.

Because that paragraph doesn't specifically state anything certain about informal licenses we can't derive anything certain about the Fair License.

As a counter example FSF does specifically state that WTFPL (v2) is free software and GPL compatible (although it is an informal license): https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL

Fun fact: OSI mentions Fair License in the list of open source licenses but not WTFPL (because they considered it being redundant of the Fair License (as Fair was already a simple enough license) and because some considered it being inconsistent http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?17:iis:634:200902 )