On Fri, Jan 30, 2026 at 7:31 PM Jilayne Lovejoy via legal <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Jerry, > > I did a bit of digging and looks like this was added to the repo back in 2022 > when we started the SPDX conversion. > > That seems to suggest that it had been considered a "bad" license previously, > but I can't find a legacy record of that. > > Reviewing the license now, it's a bit unclear to me as to what makes it > not-allowed. It states (edits on format, mine): > " Unicode, Inc. hereby grants the right to: > freely use the information supplied in this file in the creation of products > supporting the Unicode Standard, > and > to make copies of this file in any form for internal or external distribution > as long as this notice remains attached." > > The first part is a bit restrictive but the "and" and the second part seems > to help.
"Freely use the information supplied . . . in the creation of products supporting the Unicode Standard" makes it non-FOSS (leaving aside what it actually means). In principle, if I wanted to use the information in Unicode files to create some competing standard, I've breached the license. There are so many of these problematic legacy Unicode licenses in nominally-FOSS projects that we now have a "unicode-mess" label in fedora-license-data and a backlog of issues concerning them. Richard > > I believe Richard is OOO right now. Let me confer with him early next week > and one of us will get back to you! > > Thanks, > Jilayne > > > > On 1/30/26 3:33 PM, Jerry James via legal wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 3:29 PM Jerry James <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been using scancode to take an in-depth look at packages I > maintain. I'm up to packages that start with "a"! While looking at > the antlr3 package, I found that it contains 3 files with the > LicenseRef-Unicode-legacy-source-code license, which is not allowed > for Fedora [1]. The files are part of the C/C++ backend. They have > been built into binary RPMs for Fedora since 2010 [2] (Fedora 12?). > > Repoquery shows that nothing in Fedora uses the C/C++ backend. I will > build updates for F42, F43, and Rawhide that disable it. My question > is whether I need to do anything more than that. Do I need to scrub > the offending files out of the tarball, for example? > > References: > [1] > https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data/-/blob/main/data/LicenseRef-Unicode-legacy-source-code.toml > [2] > https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/antlr3/c/6398229d293262736484dc0e3d7a87bf4f8f990a > > Is there anybody who can advise me on this? I assume this license is > not allowed in Fedora due to the Limitations clause at the end. Do I > need to scrub the sources, or is simply not building the code into the > binary RPMs sufficient? > > > -- > _______________________________________________ > legal mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > 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/[email protected] > Do not reply to spam, report it: > https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new -- Richard Fontana IBM Legal (supporting Red Hat) -- _______________________________________________ legal mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] 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/[email protected] Do not reply to spam, report it: https://forge.fedoraproject.org/infra/tickets/issues/new
