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.
2) The Wiki pages refer to "files" and "content"
without specifying whether
those refer to files/content in the source rpm, the resulting binary rpms, or
both.
Example case: an upstream source tarball contains source files under let's say
BSD, LGPLv2.1+ and GPLv2+ licenses. That would mean that let's say a binary
built from all those would fall under GPLv2+. Specifying GPLv2+ as the
License tag would be misrepresenting the copyrights of the files in the
source rpm that carry BSD and LGPLv2.1+ notices. Specifying "BSD and
LGPLv2.1+ and GPLv2+" would be misrepresenting the copyright of the combined
work in the resulting binary.
My interpretation is that the License: tag represents the
license/copyright on the bits in the binary rpm.
Again, keep in mind that the License: tag is not legally binding, so its
more of a helpful tool for initial auditing, and not much more.
3) Source licenses are not the only thing that affect the
distributables'
copyrights. For example when something is built from let's say LGPLv2+
sources but linked with a GPLv2+ library, the resulting binary will be
GPLv2+, while the sources are still LGPLv2+ (unless their embedded copyright
notices are changed to GPLv2+, but that can't be done for many *GPL
licenses).
Suggested combined fix for 2) and 3) above: change the licensing guidelines to
prominently note something like that the value of the License tag represents
the copyright/license info of binary packages only, and only when built in
the configuration specified by the Fedora build system, build
dependencies/conflicts in the specfile, and no non-Fedora software installed
that will affect the build in any way. Source rpms' copyrights are
determined by the sources and other content included in them.
This seems fine to me. I'll work on drafting a change for vote.
~spot