On Thu, Mar 3, 2022 at 12:44 PM Richard Fontana rfontana@redhat.com wrote:
I see the problem with "approved"/"not-approved" as being that it sounds relatively unpleasantly "corporate" compared to "good"/"not good" which have an attractive, vaguely humorous, vaguely countercultural quality in keeping with some aspects of Fedora's roots. But the problem with "good"/"not good" is precisely around value judgments. Most of these "good" licenses are not really that good at all -- they are tolerable but in some cases barely acceptable. They meet minimum standards -- sometimes questionably so. I'm not suggesting those standards need to be made stricter; they're actually already pretty strict. But I wouldn't want to give the message that we actually think most (if not all) of these licenses are "good" in the normal English language sense of "good".
So on balance I'd support "approved" or "acceptable" over "good".
When I evaluate a project for packaging in Fedora, what I want to know is: "Is this project released under a license that permits packaging it for Fedora?" The approved/not-approved language speaks to that. That's the only value judgment I need to make, so with my packager hat on, I am okay with moving away from good/bad.
Neal's point about developers is an interesting one. Thinking about this with my developer hat on, my task is to select a license that gives me the protections I want, and gives others the right to do with it what I want them to do with it. Let's say that I have selected a candidate license, and that I want Linux distributions to redistribute my software. My question now is, "Do the Linux distributions I care about accept this license?" Approved/not-approved clearly answers that question. Good/bad sort of answers that question, but less clearly in my mind.
Sorry Neal, but I don't see how approved/not-approved loses anything over good/bad. Can you clarify what you think would be lost?