On 6/06/2022 21:33, Richard Fontana wrote:
We considered a few different options and we concluded that the best
approach is for the License: field to consist of a simple enumeration
of the licenses (including, possibly, disjunctive license expressions)
covering anything that ends up in a given binary RPM (whether compiled
to binary code or otherwise). The Fedora package maintainer is in the
best position to figure out what this subset of material in the source
code is, and how it appears to be licensed.
As a relatively new packager, the
License: field has always been a bit
confusing to me (it doesn't help that many projects don't include the
license files of libraries...). I liked the effective license approach
(although it's confusing and not easy to compute) because otherwise the
license field would look like a confusing mess for some packages. For
example moolticute [0], with the new approach (please correct me if I'm
wrong) the license field would be: "License: GPLv3+ and GPLv3 and MIT
and BSD and CC-BY". This isn't representative of the license of the
Moolticute project (which is GPLv3+).
I think the policy depends on what the goal of the license field is. I
didn't exactly know what the goal was to be honest, but Neal described
it earlier as:
The point of the License tag in Fedora is to provide good guidance
on
leveraging the software.
I'm not sure that listing all licenses that end up in
the binary rpm
accomplished this goal. But I agree that the current situation isn't
ideal, and I'm not sure what the best solution is.
[0]:
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/moolticute/blob/rawhide/f/moolticute.s...
--
Arthur Bols
fas/irc: principis