On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 6:42 PM Luis Villa <luis(a)lu.is&gt; wrote: > Hey, all- > > I was looking upstream at a new-to-me license (PIL license used in Pillow > <https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/LICENSE>). It is > MIT-ish, but ... to my mind, definitely not MIT. Line them up side-by-side > and you'll see reasonably large differences. (GitHub's `licensee` reports > the two licenses as a ~56% match, which is an imperfect measure but > indicative) > > I was considering filing it as a new-ish license at SPDX, so I checked > "is this packaged in Fedora", and I see that the Fedora python-pillow > spec > <https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-pillow/blob/master/f/python-pil... > simply labels this MIT. > > So my question: what should this be labeled as in Fedora? If the answer > is MIT, is there any guidance (formal or informal) on when MIT considers an > MIT-ish license close enough? > Fedora has a convention of using the "MIT" label for a variety of mostly nonstandard simple permissive licenses that seem to have an X/MIT sort of pedigree rather than a BSD/Berkeley sort of pedigree.

The pillow license seems similar to what OSI calls the Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer (which I think Fedora does not treat as "MIT" but that may be because of consequences of the OSI classification).