[Fedora-packaging] Licensing guidelines suggestions

[Paul Howarth]

Ville Skyttä wrote:
> On Monday 06 August 2007, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
>> On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 23:05 +0300, Ville Skyttä wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Here's a few notes/questions that IMO need to be addressed in the new
>>> licensing guidelines in Wiki.  IANAL, etc, but anyway, something for near
>>> future FPC meetings (which I still probably won't be able to attend to
>>> for a couple of weeks):
>>>
>>> 1) The licensing pages strongly imply that OSI-approved licenses are ok.
>>> However for example the original Artistic license is OSI-approved but
>>> listed in Wiki page as "bad".  Something needs real fixing - "ask
>>> upstream to move to a "good" Artistic license" is IMO just a band aid.
>>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing
>>> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php
>> I think we're going to need the Fedora Board to decide this. Its a
>> little outside of our jurisdiction, unfortunately.
> 
> Ok, I'll forward the question to fab-list, hopefully they'll pick this up.

I'll be waiting for a resolution of this before updating most of my perl 
module packages - depending on the result, the "same as perl" licensed 
modules may be "GPL+" or "GPL+ or Artistic". I favour the latter 
personally as that's what the upstream authors intended.

On a related issue, the short name "GPL+" is described as:

   A GPL or LGPL licensed package that lacks any statement of what
   version that it's licensed under in the source code/program
   output/accompanying docs is technically licensed under *any*
   version of the GPL or LGPL, not just the version in whatever
   COPYING file they include.

I presume, though it's not explicitly stated, that GPL+ can also be used 
where the license is explicitly given as "GPL version 1 or later" (e.g. 
for perl and all same-as-perl licensed modules)?

Similarly, I take LGPL+ to be suitable for packages licensed as "LGPL v2 
(not 2.1) or later" as well as for LGPL of unspecified version?

Paul.