On Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 05:18:48PM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 5:08 PM Jilayne Lovejoy jlovejoy@redhat.com wrote:
On 3/3/22 2:51 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
On Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 12:03:15PM -0700, Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:
Given that "good" and "bad" are historical for the Fedora licensing documentation - what are your thoughts on this?
I like the idea of moving to 'approved' vs 'not approved' in general. I think most people looking at that list will be looking in the context of packaging for Fedora and will just want to know if it's approved or not.
That said, I think Neil makes a good point about people choosing licenses. Would it make sense to have 'approved' and 'not approved' and 'reccomended' ? :) Of course then recommended would be subjective, but perhaps thats ok. This would just be a smaller subset of licenses that are not only approved, but encouraged by the project.
That's an interesting idea - are you thinking this would be in the context of: "If you are creating or considering a license for a package that you want included in Fedora, here is a list of recommended licenses to use" ? (which I suppose implicitly says, use an approved/good one, but don't just pick any old approved/good one, please)
Yeah... More like "If you are starting an open source project and plan to package it for Fedora, here's a list of what we consider the "best" licenses to use.
Historically I think Fedora had some informal standards around Fedora-specific projects (not Fedora packages, but projects that are in some sense part of the larger Fedora project) but I am not sure this has ever really been documented. Most Fedora projects seem to use
There have been some standards around applications/packages written for Fedora Infrastructure: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Licensing but of course thats changed somewhat in recent years with the Fedora Council saying it was ok to use non free infrastructure if needed.
GPLv2, the MIT license, LGPLv2.1, perhaps GPLv3 to some degree. I don't see a compelling need for Fedora to start making recommendations for *Fedora* projects since this has seemed to work pretty well as an informal thing. As for whether Fedora should make broader recommendations ... I am not sure at this point Fedora doing so will have much impact on upstream licensing choices so I don't know if it would really be worthwhile.
Yeah, probibly not much effect.
Internally at Red Hat, we have had a fairly lengthy list of default-approved licenses for new projects for some time now. We've thought about making this a much smaller list. I wouldn't immediately see a need for this list to be harmonized with a hypothetical Fedora recommended list since it serves rather different purposes, in contrast to our goal of harmonizing Fedora "good" and "bad" license lists more generally with internal Red Hat counterparts.
Just a thought. Perhaps it's not practical / useful now (although it might have been once upon a time).
kevin