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 (#3250): https://lists.spdx.org/g/Spdx-legal/message/3250 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] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
