On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 06:24:35PM +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote: > Hi Richard, > > On Wed, 2024-01-17 at 23:23 -0500, Richard Fontana wrote: > > I think there may be some confusion here. Red Hat originally developed > > RPMs as a packaging technology and from what I understand, from an > > early period there was a data field in spec files for licensing > > information (IIRC it was originally "Copyright:" rather than > > "License:"). Many other packaging technologies attempt to document > > licensing information. Some are worse than others. > > So at some point RPM/Fedora adopted the %license directive. > Which basically meant that we would always include the full declared > license of the project. Do you happen to know why after this the > License field was (also) kept? Might it be time to fully switch to just > including the full %license text in each package instead of also adding > the license text? If I am reading the legal guidance correctly the > License field are not legally binding, just the license text in the > package source code is.
The %license directive typically only gives the text of the overall project license. Non-trivial projects often have source included under many more licenses, for which the project usually[1] won't provide full license text. With this in mind, only providing %license will be throwing away a lot of info that "License" has. Neither is a superset of the other, they're complementary. In the rare case of projects using the reuse.software tools, the full text for every referenced license will be present, as the reuse tool forces such compliance. So few projects do this though. What's enforced by 'reuse' tools is probably the most thorough way of recording licensing I've come across. What Debian does is pretty good too but as detailed as 'reuse'. What Fedora does with %license and "License" is a very high level simplification and shouldn't be compared with either Debian or 'reuse' IMHO. IMHO Fedora's simplification was/is a human targetted presentation & record, while the Debian / reuse approach is more of a machine targetted presentation. There are merits in both approaches, so pick your poison for what you intend to achieve ? Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :| -- _______________________________________________ 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
