Hi, On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 12:54:58PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: > On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 12:49 PM Richard Fontana <rfont...@redhat.com> > wrote: > We have unambiguously rejected the > concept of the effective license, except possibly in some extreme > scenarios. For this reason alone, it is possible that most Fedora package > license tags are inaccurate even if you assume that the relevant > identifiers are truly synonymous, which they aren't. > > I am not sure how we will act upon the hope for further auditing, but maybe > better documentation could help result in more accurate (or > guidelines-conformant) license tags over a long period of time.
Sorry for not really having followed this discussion earlier. But I think not having an "effective license" is a bit of a problem for packagers of (larger) GPL packages. At least in my experience with such projects, e.g. valgrind for which I am both the packager and part of upstream. As far as I can tell most such projects follow guidelines like https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html So they might incorporate works covered by GPL compatible lax-permissive licenses, but (effectively) distribute the whole under the GPL. Although the original licenses and snippets of code are there in the code it is not really possible to extract and redistribute/use those snippets under their original licenses. Unless they are explicitly put into separate unmodified files. Because they are mixed with and treated as normal GPL code in the project. If there is a reference to the original code and version that was incorporated then you could maybe look at that and reuse that under the original declared license. But I think it is somewhat pointless to list all such code snippets separately under their original license terms. For all intends and purposes those snippets of code are really (re)distributed under the GPL now by the project incorporating them. What is the goal of dropping the effective license and make packagers list all the licences of some code snippets originally incorporated under lax-permissive licenses? Is that not just make work for the packager if upsteam just uses one effective license? Thanks, Mark _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- legal@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to legal-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/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
