On Thu, Jun 20, 2024 at 10:24:44AM -0600, Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:
On 6/19/24 6:07 PM, Richard Fontana wrote:
Relatedly, I have had some misgivings and mixed feelings about these mass conversions, because I have worried that the resulting situation will make people complacent regarding the correctness of the license tag. That is, they may assume that a converted license tag has some sort of implied stamp of approval. However, I've mostly gotten comfortable with the piecemeal mass conversions over time. I accept that we'll (still) have many inaccurate license tags, under our current documented standards, and we'll just have to gradually try to improve them.
+1 I also had a lot of misgivings. In addition to Richard's comments, I think I've come to thinking that complacency is an issue no matter what and any amount of auto-conversion is not likely to make that worse or better.
I'm not sure it's really better to stick with Callaway license tags for some longer period of time in the hope that the *first* attempt to convert a package license tag to SPDX expressions will be relatively accurate. I do worry that if everyone is complacent about this, Fedora could become yet another project using SPDX expressions inappropriately.
really don't want that!
In any case, Miro, I appreciate your observations and concerns. I think in the long run, putting in place more specific advice and better tooling for license review that is maybe even part of the packaging process would be better. Even for the packages that were diligently updated to SPDX ids won't stay up-to-date over time as packages change their licenses, etc.
+1 for continuing the (imperfect) convertion to SPDX.
For me the argument that the non-simplified licenses have to be periodically adjusted anyway to not become outdated is fairly convicing.
I think we're better off having a possibly-incomplete SPDX format license than a possibly-incomplete-in-the-same-way Spot format license. We'll be better off having the whole distro converted to a consistent format, even if some of the tags still need to expanded later.
Zbyszek