On Thu, Mar 03, 2022 at 12:03:15PM -0700, Jilayne Lovejoy wrote:
Hi all,
As has been mentioned here prior, Richard and I are having a look at the Licensing part of the Wiki with an eye towards any updates and improvements, as well as moving that to the Fedora Docs (along with David C's work on the database for the license info).
Recently Richard posted here regarding an attempt to better define the Fedora license categories in terms of what constitutes a "good" license. He referenced the use of the terminology of "good" and "bad" to indicate whether a license is approved for use in Fedora or not.
I wanted to raise that separately b/c as we go through the documentation, how to best explain things in the clearest way comes up. It'd be helpful to hear people's views on this.
Historically - "good" has meant the license is approved for use in Fedora; "bad" has meant the license is not approved for use in Fedora; and then there are also three nuanced categories related to fonts, documentation, and content which mean that certain licenses are only approved for use in that context, but not otherwise approved.
How do people feel about the use of "good", "good-for-fonts", "bad", etc to describe these categories? Would simply using "approved", "approved-for-fonts", "not-approved", etc. be easier to understand?
I'll throw in my opinion here, since I'm asking for that of others: I'm kind of mixed on this. I always thought the good/bad indicator was kind of nice in it's informality. However, now that I'm looking more closely at documentation, sometimes the use of good and bad can end up reading oddly. Practically speaking, I think use of "approved" and "not-approved" might end up being easier to understand. Good/bad also also has a greater connotation of judgement versus simply "approved" - which implies more closely that it must be approved for something. So, I guess I'd lean towards simply using "approved" and "not-approved".
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.
kevin