On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 7:04 AM Florian Weimer <fwei...@redhat.com> wrote:

> Below, I'm collecting a list of observations of what I believe is the
> current approach in this area, as taken by package maintainers carrying
> out the SPDX conversion.  To me, it strongly suggest that the SPDX
> identifiers we derive today do not accurately reflect binary RPM package
> licensing, even when lots of package maintainers put in the extra effort
> to determine binary package licenses.

I recently noticed something that could be added to this list. There's
a package that generates a '-docs' subpackage using Doxygen.
Apparently Doxygen injects various pieces of minified JavaScript
(mostly from the jQuery ecosystem, mostly MIT-licensed) in a way that
is not obvious from analyzing the source code of the package that uses
Doxygen. I assume this must be compliant with Fedora packaging
guidelines -- although I could not verify this from reading Fedora
guidelines on bundling and JavaScript.

Anyway, I would guess no Fedora package maintainer of a package that
has a Doxygen docs subpackage is taking this issue into account when
thinking about License: tags. Should they? I am having trouble seeing
why the licensing of the Doxygen pieces should be deliberately
ignored. But I also am not sure if a Fedora package maintainer should
realistically be expected to know that this situation occurs. I was
moving toward the view that if the package build process results in
the inclusion of some licensed material from another package, this can
be ignored if (a) the inclusion occurs in huge numbers of Fedora
packages and (b) most normal Fedora installs will have the other
package. I was thinking that would take care of Florian's gcc and
glibc statically-linked startup code examples, but surely neither (a)
nor (b) apply to the Doxygen case which seems sort of analogous.

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

Reply via email to