Fedora legal docs currently say: "If your package is built from files under multiple distinct licenses, and some files are licensed under a choice of two (or more) licenses, then the License: field must include the appropriate OR and AND expressions.... The license expression must reflect the disjunctive license choice even if one or both of the license identifiers in the OR expression also appear separately in the composite license expression."
I am coming around to the view that we can revise the last sentence there: For an SPDX expression involving licenses foo and bar, foo AND bar AND (foo OR bar) can acceptably be "reduced" to foo AND bar since both elements of the OR-expression are separately atomic elements of the larger AND expression. In insisting on preservation of all dual licenses (involving Fedora-allowed licenses that is), we were following what I understood to be the Callaway tradition. However, this is not entirely clear; see for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20190801152043/https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:LicensingGuidelines?rd=Packaging/LicensingGuidelines#Combined_Dual_and_Multiple_Licensing_Scenario As far as I can tell, the scenario we're talking about wasn't explicitly addressed in the old guidelines. The other part of this is that insisting on preservation of dual licenses was making an important cultural or political point. To understand this, you need to understand that some companies consuming open source have a silly practice of taking steps to explicitly select one of the licenses. As you might expect this usually happens when one of the licenses is in the *GPL family. A related phenomenon involves taking GPLv2-or-later code "as" GPLv2-only. Apart from being sort of ridiculous, this practice conflicts with the usual practice in upstream open source of passing through all disjunctive licenses. So by *not* doing this, Fedora was expressing a sort of solidarity with normal open source development and distancing itself from the practices of those companies. Since in the (foo AND bar AND (foo OR bar)) -> (foo AND bar) case the simplified expression has all of the elements that were in the dual license, I think the simplification is still in the spirit of the old rule. We would not be removing any of the license symbols on either side of the dual license; we are just hiding the fact that there was a dual license. If anyone thinks this would be a bad, or good, change to make let me know. It probably wouldn't affect too many packages and wouldn't do a whole lot to make their license tags that much shorter. I don't feel too strongly about it but I am trying to think of ways we could make SPDX expressions a little simpler without abandoning all integrity. Note that adoption of this approach this would not be an assertion that (foo AND bar AND (foo OR bar)) is *equivalent* to (foo AND bar). Richard _______________________________________________ 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
