[Fedora-legal-list] [RFC] Switching to SPDX in license tags

[Gisi, Mark]

Currently The SPDX legal group is adding to the list on a quarterly basis. I recommend you submit what licenses you feel should be included in the SPDX list that are not yet on it. The SPDX group has made efforts to incorporate licenses from various different communities including Fedora and plans to continue to do so. Not a lot of participation has come from the Fedora community in the past but would be very welcome moving forward. 

- Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: legal-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org [mailto:legal-bounces at lists.fedoraproject.org] On Behalf Of Ciaran Farrell
Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2015 6:23 AM
To: legal at lists.fedoraproject.org
Subject: Re: [Fedora-legal-list] [RFC] Switching to SPDX in license tags



On 09.07.2015 15:14, Haïkel wrote:
> 2015-07-09 14:24 GMT+02:00 Richard Fontana <rfontana at redhat.com>:
>> What distros or upstream projects are actually using the SPDX format?
>> I am not aware of any.
>>
> 
> Currently Suse is using it, they even patched their packaging 
> compliance checkers to support it.

Yes, but it is hack-ish. SPDX doesn't provide anywhere near the license short names we need, so we (openSUSE) resorted to keeping our own list in parallel. The idea was to try to get the other license short names upstream to SPDX, but that was painstakingly slow. Recently, SPDX changed the short name list again, meaning we have to go back over it.
> 
>>
>> I am aware of some projects using these identifiers. However, 
>> Fedora's use of license abbreviations is different in nature from 
>> that of SPDX, so I'd be concerned that use of the SPDX abbreviations 
>> would result in confusion (or else a costly change to Fedora's practices).
>>
>> (Separately I consider the SPDX identifiers problematic because in a 
>> number of cases they clash with common organic community 
>> abbreviations which happen to be in wide use in the Fedora 
>> community.)
>>
>> RF
>>
>>
> 
> I share your concerns about implementing it in Fedora, and before 
> starting such effort, we need Legal's approval to consider this or not.
> 
> It's mostly fixing our licensing compliance checking tools (though 
> Suse already has some patches for the ones we share), guidelines and a good calendar.

If Fedora does go ahead with SPDX shortnames, the same issue will arise (not all licenses that Fedora requires are in the SPDX short names list). Given that openSUSE 'borrowed' Fedora's good/bad license list years ago, perhaps it would be possible to sync up on those short names that SPDX does not have.



--
Ciaran Farrell
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