Hey, Some precision below :)
On 3/26/26 11:31 AM, Claudia Pellegrino wrote:
Hi manganeese, >1. What should be put as the license for projects that have a license similar to a SPDX license, but doesn't match any? * One example of this would be allwpilib[1], which has a license very similar to the BSD 3-clause license, but since it has the word "NONINFRINGEMENT" after "MERCHANTABILITY", it doesn't match as the BSD 3-clause license (if I am reading the SPDX matching guidelines correctly)The allwpilib example is a custom license. According to the wiki [1], one would declare this as e.g. `LicenseRef-BSD-3.0-Clause- Noninfringement` and place the custom license into the `LICENSES/` subdirectory as described in RFC 0052. [2]
If we're simply talking about the license of the project source here, then there's no need to put the custom license into the `LICENSES/` directory. Simply shipping it with the package (under /usr/share/licenses/$pkgname/) is the way to go.
2. I have a PKGBUILD that I made for allwpilib, and I needed to create a patch to allow it to build with -O2 instead of -O3. Should this patch be licensed under 0BSD, or the aforementioned modified BSD 3- clause license?I keep encountering this very dilemma in my own AUR PKGBUILDs. As far as I can tell, the RFC doesn’t cover this case [2]. (It does, however, cover the case of patches copied from upstream.)I noticed that the `reuse` CLI tool (around which the RFC was designed) and Arch’s `pkgctl` CLI wrapper have an opinionated default behavior around this. I.e., if you run `pkgctl license setup` on a PKGBUILD repository and it includes a patch, then the tool assigns it the upstream license automatically, even if you wrote the patch yourself.IANAL but I think that this default behavior is quite reasonable approach (even though a little conservative.) Reasonable because even if you wrote the patch yourself, the surrounding-lines context may still contain copyrighted code from upstream and I think we need to comply with that.Out of an abundance of caution, what I keep doing is leave it as the tool suggests (i.e. release the patch under the upstream license). Additionally, I put *both* `Arch Linux Contributors` (because I authored the patch) *and* the upstream author of the surrounding context into the `SPDX-FileCopyrightText` (example: [3]).This method is erring pretty much on the side of caution but I’d love to learn how others feel about this.
If you wrote the patch yourself and have no intent to upstream it, you're free to license it however you want. As per RFC52, we are encouraging people to license package sources (include local patches _they wrote themselves_) under 0BSD and add it to the "Arch Linux Contributors" block in REUSE.toml. This is not mandatory though, you are free to use the LICENSE you want, but be aware that files not licensed under 0BSD are not eligible for promotion in Arch Linux official repository (as stated in RFC52).
If the patch has been submitted / merged upstream, then it should defacto be licensed under the same license as upstream, with said license being included in the LICENSES directory and the patch added to a new block referring to "<project_name> Contributors" (which is what REUSE assumes as the default behavior).
I hope that clarifies it :)
Regards Claudia [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PKGBUILD#license [2]: https://rfc.archlinux.page/0052-reuse/[3]: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/REUSE.toml?h=en- croissant#n32
-- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz
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