Thanks Richard, that’s helpful to point out! That and Steve’s point re: Debian Main makes me think we’d need to be somewhat specific for each distro that would trigger a lighter-weight review. More to ponder….
And Steve - agreed re: Change Proposal, I’ll add that to my list of things to do and send a link to that once I’ve come up with something concrete! Jilayne > On Sep 15, 2022, at 10:08 PM, Richard Fontana <rfont...@redhat.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 7, 2022 at 2:17 PM Steve Winslow <swins...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Jilayne -- yes, I'd be open to a lighter-weight or streamlined approach to >> approving licenses submitted from use in distros such as Debian and Fedora. >> >> In these cases we have greater confidence that those communities have done >> the work to vet certain of the license inclusion principles. In particular >> the first and most important "Other Factor" re: "substantially complies with >> open source definitions"; and its inclusion in the distro likely >> demonstrates the "substantial use" factor for SPDX purposes. >> >> I expect we'd want to be a bit specific about what we mean by "is included >> in the distro". For instance, for Debian I'd think `main` would be covered, >> `non-free` would not, and I don't know for `contrib`. I don't know how >> Fedora divides things up... > > In contrast to Debian, Fedora does not have separate > official/project-administered package repositories with different > license inclusion criteria. > > Fedora has an explanation here that may be helpful: > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-approval/ > > To summarize, there are different categories of material to which > different license standards are applied: > > - The general "allowed" category -- licenses here are determined by > Fedora to be FOSS through a sort of common law-like approach (Fedora > has no DFSG/FSD/OSD counterpart of its own) > - "Allowed-documentation" -- licenses approved only for documentation. > The intent here is that the licenses are libre, i.e., equivalent in > permissiveness/restrictiveness to software-oriented FOSS licenses, > except that a few licenses (already recognized by SPDX) are treated as > allowed-documentation for historical reasons even though they can't > seriously be considered to meet all the standards of the licenses in > the allowed category > - "Allowed-content" -- licenses approved only for "content" which > basically means something that can't be considered software, > documentation, or fonts. These have to be FOSS except they can > prohibit modification and have a "no patent licenses" provision. > - "Allowed-firmware" -- licenses approved only for binary firmware > files that meet certain technical operating system-related criteria; > these licenses need not be FOSS but only certain kinds of non-FOSS > terms are permitted. > - "Allowed-fonts" -- licenses approved only for fonts. These licenses > must meet the standards for FOSS except that they can have a "Sun RPC" > clause (i.e. a prohibition on resale/distribution in isolation, which > is for some reason commonly found in pseudo-FOSS font licenses). The > main community authorities on FOSS definitional norms (FSF, OSI, > Debian) have all implicitly taken the position that these kinds of > clauses do not preclude a classification of a font license as FOSS, > but to varying degrees and with a large dose of historical > inconsistency have taken the view that they are generally not > acceptable in a FOSS software license. Fedora is simply being more > transparent that there are relaxed community standards for font > licenses in this one respect. > > So I think Fedora has made an effort to ensure that the licenses in > the "allowed", "allowed-documentation" and "allowed-fonts" categories > substantially comply with widely-held community open source > definitions. That can't be said of all licenses in the > allowed-content (probably) and allowed-firmware (definitely) > categories. However, I wonder if the fact that these generally > non-FOSS licenses are determined to meet the license criteria of a > distro that is basically conceptualized as a free software community > distro ought to justify the lighter-weight review Jilayne speaks of. > > Richard > > > > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3251): https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-legal/message/3251 Mute This Topic: https://lists.spdx.org/mt/93487313/21656 Group Owner: spdx-legal+ow...@lists.spdx.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-legal/unsub [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
