[Fedora-legal-list] Re: rust-regex-syntax package license change: added Unicode-DFS-2016 license

On Tue, Dec 20, 2022 at 2:47 PM Fabio Valentini <decathorpe(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The only reason why you might be "wrong" is if it should be concluded that the Unicode license doesn't really apply to *anything* here. I'm reluctant to reach that conclusion in this case, but I feel it ought to be mentioned. This is ultimately Unicode's fault for attempting to impose its view of intellectual property on the rest of the world. :) I mean, the Rust Foundation counsel isn't wrong. This "hide some of the licenses" tendency in FOSS is a pretty deeply rooted cultural practice. There's a form of it in Fedora, which we're trying to move beyond. They are definitely different standards for license metadata, but the standards are non-uniform across all the various project, packaging and distribution communities. I have some thoughts relating to this because I've recently been looking at the licensing and license metadata of a large number of Rust crates (for something having nothing to do with Fedora or Fedora-derived packages). In general, FOSS license metadata is not great quality, in my opinion. Again, there's a culture of "hide some of the licenses" for (and this is what's most annoying) generally non-well-articulated reasons, but also there's been a tradition of using license symbols to have highly imprecise meanings. That is partly what has motivated these recent changes in Fedora: we are trying to do something to improve the situation. I think my attitude used to be that this was an unimportant problem because license metadata was unimportant, but I don't think that is tenable anymore. In the *Rust* case, things are typically not so bad, because these Rust projects are typically so small and simple and are fairly young (my non-technical impression), and there also is apparently a sort of license monoculture that dominates Rust project development (e.g. I found one GPL crate out of about 200 or so in what I was looking at). So they don't have the complexity (both structurally and license-wise) seen in some of the relatively old Fedora packages, particularly of projects written in C and so forth. I looked at your package, and what surprised me is that you patched the Cargo.toml file to "correct" the upstream license metadata, given that the upstream project has rejected the change. I guess partly why I have made those remarks on Rust is that while I see how it is tedious to deal with two different standards of license metadata, it really isn't *that* bad in the Rust case (most of the time). If the tediousness is because you can't just take the upstream metadata, assume it must be correct, and just automate the populating of the RPM metadata ... well, think about what the Fedora package maintainers of things like krb5 or Webkit2GTK will have to deal with. Even in the Rust case, assuming the upstream metadata is accurate seems unjustified, given the standard of accuracy Fedora is striving for. It's more like, you can reasonably assume it's accurate enough in most cases that you don't have to examine things too deeply or critically, and you can certainly rely on the upstream metadata as a good starting point. I guess there is also an argument that it is inefficient to carry downstream license metadata patches that result from the existence of different license metadata systems. This argument seems like it can only make sense if it looks like the two systems are both based on the same symbolic system, which is arguably true for Rust and Fedora since both communities are attempting to use SPDX identifiers. I'm sympathetic to this, but it is essentially saying "if Rust projects hide some of the licenses, Fedora should do so too". Which doesn't feel quite right to me. Richard