[Fedora-legal-list] Re: When can license notices be removed or not (Was: Re: SPDX Statistics - R.U.R. edition)
On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 6:34 PM Mark Wielaard <mark(a)klomp.org> wrote:
Although I don't like the advice I am interested when such
license
notices can be removed. That would make some discussions about whether
or not to include extra tags/expressions easier (if it is possible to
just remove the notice, then it also doesn't need to be mentioned in a
license tag/expression).
It was my understanding that legal notices can never be removed,
because most licenses actually say you may not remove them, but that
might be chicken-egg reasoning :)
It's not chicken-egg reasoning. It's correct that most free software
licenses require notices not to be removed (assuming they're actual
licenses in a given case of course). But with some free software
licenses, there is no such requirement.
However, you say: "if it is possible to just remove the notice, then
it also doesn't need to be mentioned in a
license tag/expression". I have suggested this sort of approach. This
would eliminate all use of `LicenseRef-Fedora-Public-Domain` and
`LicenseRef-Fedora-UltraPermissive` umbrella identifiers from License
tags (note, it would not justify eliminating these identifiers from
Fedora License Data or ending the attempt to catalogue licenses in
these categories). But my Fedora Legal team colleagues seemed to
dislike this suggestion. I think we should continue to consider it.
Also if we adopted this approach, there's the difficult question of
what to do about CC0, which has no notice preservation requirement of
course, but which has something "wrong" with it (the clause about no
patent licenses) which I think may be a good reason to include CC0-1.0
in License tags, at least in those cases where CC0 is applied to code.
Richard