On Thu, Jul 18, 2024 at 4:48 PM Neal Gompa <ngomp...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 18, 2024 at 3:39 AM Miro Hrončok <mhron...@redhat.com> wrote: > > > > On 18. 07. 24 1:30, Neal Gompa wrote: > > > You are conflating license tag conversion with a license audit. Tag > > > conversion is explicitly*not* an audit exercise. > > > > No, I state the old GPL tags and the new GPL identifiers have different > > meanings.
> This is not the case. Even going back to the beginning when the case > was first made and all the identifiers were being categorized, all the > GNU license tags we had for the Fedora system were matched 1:1 to the > SPDX ones. They do not have different meanings. FWIW, I do not think they have entirely the same meaning. SPDX identifiers carry with them the baggage of how they are partially defined in the SPDX spec, and (unlike most projects using SPDX identifiers) Fedora, in the legal docs anyway, places a lot of emphasis on relying on the SPDX definition, as suboptimal as it is, for example the relevance of the SPDX XML files and the SPDX matching guidelines. The GPL identifiers are a special case also because of how the FSF persuaded SPDX to replace "+" with "-or-later" and standalone identifiers with "-only" without really explaining if there was a difference and what it was (and I don't get the sense the FSF itself was clear on this). As for the Callaway license abbreviations, they were never really explicitly or formally defined. I'm not sure how much this matters for the various GPL identifiers. I'd rather focus on "correct" use of SPDX expressions going forward, and wrt the GPL cases I'm not sure if conversion from AGPLv3 to "LicenseRef-Callaway-AGPLv3" or "AGPL-3.0-only" gets us closer to that goal. I actually have a slight preference for "LicenseRef-Callaway-AGPLv3" I guess, but I don't care that much, as long as Fedora package maintainers are open to continual gradual improvement in quality of license tags. > That the form of how GNU license identifiers differ from how we did it > before is why I *explicitly* asked and got confirmation about when it > happened. Everyone was forced to deal with it when SPDX deprecated the > "+" modifier and the associated GNU license tags that used it. > > The *only* actual difference between "time of Fedora identifiers" and > "time of now" is that we have this quest to use SPDX identifiers > everywhere and our ability to simplify *informational* license tags > has been removed. In the Callaway era, official Fedora documentation was at best contradictory on whether and to what extent it was appropriate to simplify license tags. Many packages from the latter ~10-15 years of that era that had fairly complex license tags (GCC is an example that comes to mind) that can't be explained if there were a general simplification practice going on. I believed and still believe that the general tendency was to discourage simplification as Fedora (and particularly Mr. Callaway himself, I think) got increasingly sophisticated about free software licensing stuff, though this was widely ignored or was not well known to the extent it was documented. Sorry to harp on this but it bothers me that people think the post-SPDX-adoption Fedora legal invented a rule against simplification of license tags. Richard -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
