On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 6:42 PM Luis Villa <luis(a)lu.is> wrote:
Hey, all-
I was looking upstream at a new-to-me license (PIL license used in Pillow
<
https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/LICENSE>). It is
MIT-ish, but ... to my mind, definitely not MIT. Line them up side-by-side
and you'll see reasonably large differences. (GitHub's `licensee` reports
the two licenses as a ~56% match, which is an imperfect measure but
indicative)
I was considering filing it as a new-ish license at SPDX, so I checked "is
this packaged in Fedora", and I see that the Fedora python-pillow spec
<
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-pillow/blob/master/f/python-pil...
simply labels this MIT.
So my question: what should this be labeled as in Fedora? If the answer is
MIT, is there any guidance (formal or informal) on when MIT considers an
MIT-ish license close enough?
Fedora has a convention of using the "MIT" label for a variety of mostly
nonstandard simple permissive licenses that seem to have an X/MIT sort of
pedigree rather than a BSD/Berkeley sort of pedigree. The pillow license
seems similar to what OSI calls the Historical Permission Notice and
Disclaimer (which I think Fedora does not treat as "MIT" but that may be
because of consequences of the OSI classification).
Richard