Some of the complaints that have surfaced since the migration from the
Callaway system to SPDX seem to be, at root, an aesthetic distaste for
complex license expressions in RPM license metadata. This may explain
why some favor application of "effective license" analysis. I suspect
there is also a sort of psychological desire to hide the underlying
licensing complexity that characterizes many packages.
I do think that the current approach can be criticized as being overly
pedantic, and perhaps also internally contradictory (some of Florian's
recent comments get at the various ways in which we are being
contradictory). We have a still-undocumented rule that what I call
"true public domain" should not be reflected in the License: field
(unless it would otherwise be empty), yet we have carefully attempted
to collect nonstandard public domain dedication statements and cover
those by `LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain`. We have been using a
similar approach with `LicenseRef-Fedora-UltraPermissive`. These
basically replace Callaway system names "Public domain" (though this
was sometimes used for "true public domain") and "Freely
redistributable without restrictions", respectively.
I think it can reasonably be argued that there is little point in
including `LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain` and
`LicenseRef-Fedora-UltraPermissive` in the License: field since they
are associated with no conditions or obligations. In those special
cases where the License: field would otherwise be empty, we can ask
SPDX to create unique identifiers for the license text in question.
We might want to extend this principle to other things, such as GPL
exceptions that entail no conditions in the use case encountered in
particular packages. (There is already an old issue about this, I
think concerning the Bison exception.)
This wouldn't do *that* much to make License: fields simpler, so maybe
it's not particularly worthwhile. There is also the problem that if we
make it optional, package maintainers may be less likely to scrutinize
things that are assumed to fall into these kinds of categories, when
in some cases they actually wouldn't, although I think it's now clear
that those situations are uncommon. In theory we'd still expect
package maintainers to submit issues to have things that seem to
qualify for LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain reviewed, but it might be
challenging to enforce that expectation and the Fedora Legal team
would have to end up doing all that work themselves, which might be a
justifiable result.
As with abandoning the "license of the binary" rule, this would
seemingly be a major departure from the principles established under
the Callaway system.
Any thoughts on this?
Richard