-------- Forwarded Message --------
On behalf of all of the folks working on Fedora licensing
improvements,
I have a few things to announce!
New docs site for licensing and other legal topics
--------------------------------------------------
All documentation related to Fedora licensing has moved to a new
section in Fedora Docs, which you can find at:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/
Other legal documentation will follow. This follows the overall
Fedora
goal of moving active user and contributor documentation away from
the
wiki.
Fedora license information in a structured format
-------------------------------------------------
The “good” (allowed) and “bad” (not-allowed) licenses for Fedora
are
now stored in a repository, using a simple structured file format
for
each license (it’s TOML). You can find this at:
https://gitlab.com/fedora/legal/fedora-license-data
This data is then presented in easy tabular format in the
documentation, at:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/allowed-licenses/
New policy for the License field in packages — SPDX identifiers!
----------------------------------------------------------------
We’re changing the policy for the "License" field in package spec
files
to use SPDX license identifiers. Historically, Fedora has
represented
licenses using short abbreviations specific to Fedora. In the
meantime,
SPDX license identifiers have emerged as a standard, and other
projects, vendors, and developers have started using them.
Adopting
SPDX license identifiers provides greater accuracy as to what
license
applies, and will make it easier for us to collaborate with other
projects.
Updated licensing policies and processes
----------------------------------------
Fedora licensing policies and processes have been updated to
reflect
the above changes. In some cases, this forced deeper thought as to
how
these things are decided and why, which led to various discussion
on
Fedora mailing lists. In other cases, it prompted better
articulation
of guidance that was implicitly understood but not necessarily
explicitly stated.
New guidance on “effective license” analysis
--------------------------------------------
Many software packages consist of code with different free and
open
source licenses. Previous practice often involved “simplification”
of
the package license field when the packager believed that one
license
subsumed the other — for example, using just “GPL” when the source
code
includes parts licensed under a BSD-style license as well. Going
forward, packagers and reviewers should not make this kind of
analysis,
and rather use (for example) “GPL-2.0-or-later AND MIT”. This
approach
is easier for packagers to apply in a consistent way.
When do these changes take effect?
----------------------------------
The resulting changes in practice will be applied to new packages
and
licenses going forward. It is not necessary to revise existing
packages
at this time, although we have provided some guidance for package
maintainers who want to get started. We’re in the process of
planning a
path for updating existing packages at a larger scale — stay tuned
for
more on that!
Thank you everyone!
-------------------
A huge thanks to some key people who have worked tirelessly to
make
this happen: David Cantrell, Richard Fontana, Jilayne Lovejoy,
Miroslav
Suchý. Behind the scenes support was also provided by David
Levine,
Bryan Sutula, and Beatriz Couto. Thank you as well for the
valuable
feedback from Fedora community members in various Fedora forums.
Please have a look at the updated information. If you have
questions,
please post them to the Fedora Legal mailing list:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/legal@.../
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm@...>
Fedora Project Leader
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